these Open Championship Clubs choose to relief grind - Pitchcare

Golf
Seamus Moriarty’s dream
of working abroad was
realised when he
contacted Mike O’Keeffe
about the Ohio State
University’s International
Exchange Programme.
Placed into Lake Merced
Golf Club, he soon found
out that shorts and
sunscreen were not the
order of the day in this
particular part of
California
24 PC FEBRUARY/MARCH 2012
Seamus Moriarty
“We maintain a
stimp reading of
11.5 to 12 feet on
a daily basis,
regardless of
weather”
California
Dreamin’
On such a foggy day!
After spending nearly six years in
Adare Manor, which included two
Irish Opens and two JP McManus
Pro Ams, the time had come to
move on. So, I sent an email to
Mike O’Keeffe at The Ohio State
University International Exchange
Programme explaining my story. From
the very beginning, Mike was great in
explaining how much would be expected
of me if I took part on the programme,
and that this would be the biggest test of
my career thus far. After some planning,
and a short conversation with my new
Superintendent, Zach Ohsann, my host
golf course was confirmed as Lake
Merced Golf Club in the San Francisco
Bay Area.
I arrived in San Francisco at the end of
May 2011. The golf club is located in
Daly City, which is about ten miles south
of downtown San Francisco. Zach had
taken over here at the helm from the
previous super at the beginning of April.
Realising that the previous super had just
retired after forty-six years of service, I
was pleased to hear of Zach’s immediate
plans to change more than a few things,
both agronomically and nonagronomically.
During my first few days here, I began
to familiarise myself with the course and
the crew. The course itself was originally
designed by Dr Alistair McKenzie and
has gone through a few design changes
since then; by Rees Jones in 1996 and a
greens renovation in 2010.
Lake Merced is a beautiful golf course
set amongst some of the most
magnificent pine sand Monterey Cypress
trees one could imagine. The crew
consists of twenty, each of them bringing
with them their own unique culture and
ethnicity. As you can imagine, the
canteen in the morning is an interesting
place to be with such diversity and
different languages filling the air.
Immediately, Zach and I set about
setting our goals for the remaining six
months of the year, the most important
of these being an aeration programme,
whereby light, but frequent applications
of sand topdressings are performed on
the greens, approaches and tees.
With the USGA Girls’ Junior
Championship scheduled for July 2012,
it was imperative that we implement an
intense topdressing programme to all
surfaces. Hollow tine or solid tine
aeration is to be kept at a minimum, so
topdressing with our double screened
USGA specification sand will help us
dilute the thatch layer that is
accumulating beneath the turf, and also
keep surfaces as firm as possible. We
follow a similar aeration programme with
our tees and approaches, with minimal
disruption to play being key. Some of the
most important things I have learned
from Zach already are to always have a
plan A and a plan B, record everything
and, most importantly, take pictures of
everything!
The weather here in Daly City is pretty
amazing. When I was packing a bag to
come from Killarney to Northern
California, I anticipated many
necessities, such as shorts, t-shirts, and
plenty of sunscreen. Well, I soon
discovered that sunshine certainly is not
the norm here! During the summer
months of July and August, the fog sits
out in the bay and, when it gets pushed
in by the warm sea air, the area becomes
submerged in fog. This fog may persist
for days, even weeks at a time. Quite
often I find myself having to change into
dry clothes at lunch time for the
remainder of the day. It’s amazing!
This mild, damp weather obviously
increases disease pressure. It’s not
unusual to apply fungicides on a biweekly
basis.
Another project under my
responsibility was to become familiar with
the pesticide products, and to create a
rotation system so that no strains of
pathogen become resistant to any
fungicide. At this moment in time, we
have a rotation with ten different
fungicides.
I have learned many things during my
term at the club regarding the
expectations of playing conditions in
America. The most significant is the
quality of the putting surfaces. At first,
the expectations seemed unreasonable;
maintaining a stimp reading of 11.5 to
12 feet on a daily basis, regardless of
weather.