The leveling of 8 red green

The reconstruction of 8 red green:

This project has been talked about for several years at the committee meetings and now that we have finished lengthening the course with new black tees it has come to fruition. For anybody that plays golf at Valley Brook on a regular basis it has been very apparent that we have not used the fronts of three and eight red greens for several years because of the modern day green speeds. You may not realize that the average green speeds have increased by 20% over the past ten years in our region. This has evolved because of better aerification, topdressing techniques and mostly from the use of growth regulators.

The following video shows the process that we took to lower the center of the green which in turn levels the front of the green. We were only able to do this lowering because this particular green had two feet of sand mix in the center of the green which is very unusual with green construction. With proper green construction we would have hit the gravel blanket by lowering the surface making it unfeasible. Once again for those of you that play a lot likely have seen us hand syringing that part of the green often because of this excessive amount of sand causing isolated dry spots. We have been asked about why we did not raise the front of the green instead of lowering the middle. This would have caused even deeper sand depths in the front causing additional problems with the sand being far in excess of normal construction. We currently have this problem on five gold green with the reconstruction methods using excessive sand amounts causing us to hand syringe that green often throughout the day.