| By Scott Lewis
We’ve come a long way since the original Scottish golf course bunkers, which were formed by sheep burrowing to escape the cold weather. Today it’s an irony of golf courses that while bunkers cause endless frustration to golfers, well-placed bunkers are part of what gives a great golf course its unique character.
That should probably be “well-placed and well-maintained” bunkers, and, as Shakespeare (and what a golfer he would have made) would say, “there’s the rub”. If there is one thing likely to trigger a complaint from a club member or even casual player it’s landing in a bunker that they feel significantly disadvantages them due to poor maintenance. That attitude, and the need to keep the players happy, is the trigger to the substantial amount of work the course staff puts into keeping their golf course’s bunkers in good shape.
What makes a good bunker?
Bunker maintenance remains fraught with problems. First of all, there’s the issue of what exactly is a well-maintained bunker. Two points that everyone can agree on are that a bunker must be raked consistently, and that the depth of sand should be consistent on the bottom and the slopes of the bunker. This is achievable, though it can be expensive, a point we’ll get to later.
The third measure of bunker quality is that the sand should be the same consistency throughout the bunkers. This is more difficult to achieve with simple maintenance. The main cause for an alteration in the consistency of bunker sand is contamination with soil. Contamination with soil occurs usually through a process of erosion and exposure caused by moisture, in the form of rain and/or irrigation. The sand gets mixed with soil, and becomes much firmer.
One of the difficulties here, in terms of overall course consistency for bunkers, is that bunkers close to a green are going to receive much more irrigation off-flow, and thus more contamination. Correcting for this, without a huge budget, is just about impossible.
Cost factors: what’s reasonable?
Many golf courses today are facing tough times financially. We all know that the golfing industry will recover and surge ahead in coming years, but it seems likely the next year or two will continue to be tough. While there are some areas where it is possible for the canny supervisor to economize, using slightly cheaper chemicals and getting another year of use out of an old tractor, the one area where it is hard to save is in labour costs. High-level bunker maintenance requires substantial amounts of labour. As odd as it might seem, many golf courses report spending nearly as much time and effort keeping bunkers perfect as they do on maintaining their greens. In the golfing season bunker maintenance can require something like 200 hours of labour a week. You can add to that the cost of the sand many courses use, which is manufactured, and thus significantly more expensive than “regular” sand, and which typically accrues substantial trucking costs as well.
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If you are responsible for maintaining the course, what can you do? There are really two integrated courses of action: reduce the amount of maintenance on the bunkers to a more reasonable level, and increase awareness among golfers that they themselves are responsible in large part for the quality of the bunkers.
Reasonable maintenance might include a monthly edging of the bunkers to maintain their shape and form, and a weekly raking to make sure weeds don’t have a chance to get started. This needs to be accompanied by some effort to further educate golfers at the course as to how they can help to keep the bunkers in good shape. Golf etiquette at many courses is not faring so well, as the new golfers that are driving much of the demand for courses have not had time to become inculcated with the values many of us have absorbed from parents and colleagues. It’s tempting to think of them as “lazy” or “uncaring”, but actually many golfers simply don’t know.
One creative solution to this is to ask the management of the golf course to make available a simple, free lesson to new golfers in etiquette. This could cover some of the more obscure rules of the game itself, and perhaps ten minutes or so on how to look after bunkers. Have half a dozen of the participants hit out of the bunker without maintenance, then show them what a mess this makes. Then have the same people hit out (or just play a few strokes, if they’re beginning golfers), but each one do his/her bit to make the bunker neat after the shot. That’s the kind of lesson that people will remember. The point to get across is that once your ball is in the bunker, it’s way too late to start raking.
If education doesn’t work to get golfers to take better care of the bunkers, it might be time to bring the sheep back. A few well-placed Merinos will definitely get the laggards whipped into shape!
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