Goodbye and Goodluck

During the week we said farewell to Jimmy who as everyone knows, or should do, has been the Assistant Superintendent for the past 4 years. Jimmy has decided to work with a mining company, and take the ridiculous money they offer, I wish him well and commend him for the desire to get his young family ahead.

Jimmy and myself started within a few weeks of each other in the winter of 2008, with absolutely no turf records on hand, no greenkeeper on staff to inform of any issues, we both thought through our own observations and testing at the time we were sitting pretty for the coming summer.
How wrong we were, our first summer together on course was challenging to say the least, and we soon realised that not only were we dealing with different seasonal issues as we would expect, we both agreed it was like dealing with two entirely different golf courses so far removed from each other it wasn't funny. We often remark to this day the huge disparity between the golf course in summer compared to other times with not one comparable feature.

Needless to say we quickly set about planning and implementing management programs from scratch to address the issues we should have been aware of through the absent records, that process continues today as we work through seasonal issues and build a base from which to work on, this can be seen on course through continual improvement.

I think over the past 4 years Jimmy and I built a very professional relationship and friendship born from our initial summer together, the 4 of us on staff have made a great team and so I wish Jimmy all the best for his future and thank him for his assistance over the past few years.   

Other news for the week
 This week was a very disruptive week for course work, the Public Holiday (respectfully an important one) on Wednesday, meant a 4 day week which included, the Ladies changing their competition day to Monday from Wednesday, the normal men's comp for Tuesday and Thursday, and today's Police Charity Day with a shotgun start at 11. It didn't leave a great deal of time other than course set up and normal course mowing.
We did manage to groom the greens, between all the competitions thanks to staff being flexible enough to vary working hours, and repair another broken pipe on the back 9 before play.
Tho a disruptive week, it ended up being a very productive one as well.

As a final note, I will be posting the results of the summer green speed trial in the next week, it will be posted in 3 or 4 parts to get the information I need to cover into the blog format

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