Tour Preparations / Monday Madness

 


The countdown is well and truly on until The Tour Championship hits the fairways of East Lake Golf Club. We only 41 days away and time is not stopping for anybody!

The weather trend continues to be in our favor with high skies and plenty of sunshine which has been a blessing since the 9 day closure. We have recorded around 4 inches of rain for the month of July with the added fertility and rainfall the golf course is looking sharp.


GREENS UPDATE

Since the course closure for summer maintenance the greens have really progressed well. After all of the cultural practices we performed, the greens have completely healed and are right back on track with our desired cutting height and greens speeds.
So far this week we have backtrack ultra groomed the greens which will be done on a weekly basis in lead up to The Tour Championship. Following the groom we backtracked mowed and topdressed the putting surface.
This week we went back to the ultra dwarf topdressing mix (#60 screen) to be able to topdress more frequently and to more easily work the finer sand into the canopy of the plant. Previously we were using a medium grain mix (#45 screen) while our cultural practices were taking place.


FAIRWAY UPDATE

We recently made our final application of turflon / fusilade to fairways in hope of removing as much bermuda contamination as possible. That being said if you have played East Lake in the last few days you may have noticed the fairways were a little off color. This is temporary and the fairways will return to there normal color in a short time.
Also on Monday the fairways were circle cut. This is the third time this month we have performed this process. The variety of zoysia we have is meyer and it tends to get very grainy, the circle cut allows us to attack the grain at many different angles and essentially the fairway gets at least double cut in multiple directions.


ROUGH UPDATE

One of our goals as a department this year was to make the rough around the course more consistent. To achieve this we have added extra fertility to the roughs and altered some cultural practices. One of the issues we had here was maintaining a consistent stand of rough around the greens(inside rope lines) There were many factors contributing to this problem the main one being traffic from our maintenance practices such as sprayer and topdressier traffic, and the other being from the golfers exiting from the same point of the green. To remedy the issue we started to drop spread extra fertility some 30 feet out from the collars. The drop spread application has made a significant difference and hopefully the green surrounds will be more challenging for the top 30 golfers.

BUILD OUT

If you have been to East Lake I think its fair to say that Schaffer sports are rocking and rolling along. Construction for the corporate village is near finished as is the corporate suites along 17 fairway. They have also started bleachers for the viewing of the public around 18 green, 17 green and 16 green.

6 bridge installation
Construction around 16 green
Corporate suites along 17 fairway
Bleachers around 18 tee

 

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