Managing Expectations

With memberships growing and more play over winter, we look at the challenges faced by greenkeepers and how we can all do our bit to help

- By Jeremy Ellwood. Photographs by Getty Images and Kevin Murray

What are your expectations over how your home course is likely to look this April when pristine Augusta National hits our screens and golfers begin eyeing up the new season? By then, the keen TV golf fan will have been fed a steady diet of visual perfection from Hawaii, California, Florida, the Middle East and South Africa, where the climates are more kindly disposed towards course presentation from December to March than within these shores.

It’s a completely unfair comparison, but sadly, one that some golfers still make as they head out excitedly once the Green Jacket has been draped around someone’s shoulders. “Augusta does give a false impression,” Lucy Sellick, head greenkeeper at Wenvoe Castle Golf Club in South Wales, tells me. “Temperature-wise it’s hugely different; the inputs and nutrient levels are hugely different; and they probably have more people working on one hole than we have in our entire team! It’s always down to managing expectations. Yes, we should always try to exceed expectations, but you have to match them to the resources available.”

Looking back, it’s important to remember that in many parts of the UK&I, golf courses were closed for much of the first three months of 2021, giving them a bit of a breather. While undesirable for golf clubs and golfers, it must surely have done the courses themselves some good at a time when they are most susceptible to wear and damage, from which it then takes time to recover in the spring.