6.11 Update

It's been touch and go the last few weeks as we've been battling some inclement weather passing through our area. Golf Sculptors has to maximize their time on the course and we're in a good spot as we move into the middle of June.

Here is a quick rundown of where we stand:

- All 18 of the greens on the course have been excavated and have had the liners removed. Only the 3 practice greens remain for this process.

- We walked the course yesterday with Greg Muirhead from the Rees Jones group and the leadership team from Golf Sculptors. On each green, we audited the work that had been done and got final approval from Greg on the slopes / contours of each green.

- The next step now it to fill in the greens cavities that we excavated with the new sand mix and prepare the surfaces to be sprigged with grass. We expect this process to continue over the next few weeks, with an anticipated sprig date on greens closer to the beginning of July.

Here is a breakdown of the some of the work that has been going on:

An important step for greens along the way after Golf Sculptors removed the grass was to work the sand and check the percent of slope in the areas where we normally put pin locations. Given our expected green speeds, we wanted to keep this within the range of 1% to 2.5% of slope give or take a little bit.

You can see in the video above that the foreman with the digital slope reader is instructing the workers to move sand along with the excavator to certain spots to achieve these numbers.

In the picture above is Greg Muirhead (Gentleman on the left) and and Luis from Golf Sculptors (Gentleman on the right). As we walked the greens yesterday, we discussed where we typically place pin locations and checked the percent of slope in those areas. We would take readings in two directions to make sure that the area would remain within our guidelines for a cup location. If we liked what we saw in a cupping area, we would check the next spot.

If we found a spot we wanted to solten or enhance based on the readings, we marked them with paint and had the team from Golf Sculptors come out to amend the sand to make it how we wanted it. Above is a good example on #2 green where we will add some material to bring up this little ridge on the putting surface.

It's been fun to see where some of these original green complexes were built and now that we've exposed the original outline of the greens, we can restore them to spec. Check out #18 above, only about 3ft separates the greens edge from the lake, we'll be able to have some some great pin locations by the water to test your shot making.

We repurposed all of the greens mix that we excavated and spread it across approaches and fairways. A great example shown above is #18 approach. They used that material from the green to better grade the slope to allow for enhanced drainage towards the lake. We will see better turf quality as a result.

That's a 3.5" long pencil that we put into the ground on #3 Fairway. I pushed it down until it hit the original fairway grade. We gained about a 2" sand cap on both #3 and #14 fairways to try and enhance the growing medium on these holes. We typically struggled with the soil structure along the bayou on these numbers so we decided to take a bulk of the sand to try and build up these profiles.

Material handlers would dump the sand excavated from the putting surfaces on the fairways. A tractor with a specialized box blade would spread out the sand evenly after that.

Our team focused on tee boxes again, performing a verticut on the tee surfaces. The machines have specialized blades that slice down into the canopy, removing organic matter. I like this machine on our tee boxes especially because it's more aggressive on the high spots. Since our tees were sodded last year, we have lots of little peaks and valleys from the different heights of the sod. It's a normal part of the sod process.

We'll verticut lightly weekly during the summer months to keep knocking down these high spots on the tees. Applications of sand topdressing will help us fill in the low spots so using the two practices together will help level out the tee boxes, allowing for lower heights of cut and a better surface overall.

We began sod prep in areas away from construction. We'll focus on cart path edges and greens complexes once the team from Golf Sculptors is out of town. For now, we'll work hard to fill in any voids along tree areas with new sod.

New pop up sprinklers were installed around the tee boxes on #1. This will allow us to more efficiently water just the new zoysia grass and reduce the amount of water we have to put on the bermuda grass. We've struggled with wet areas as you walk up to the tee surfaces. We hope this process will help improve this issue and we plan on doing more tee boxes with this same process before we open.

Thanks for reading and for being a member.

Willie