Kevin Munt Golf Consultant

How green is your mower?

BTME Harrogate Product Review

Metallic orange is the new green, take a close look at it (left click on the pic). It doesn’t have a name other than Actioneco, which I think is the company name and not the machine name, a marketing faux pas if ever I saw one. There is however no denying that it makes you look, I am sure many of the visitors to BTME said what **** is that.

STRI tools for Putting Green surface trueness and firmness

BTME Harrogate Product Review

How often have you said that your greens were both firm and true? How do you quantify these statements, what are the scientific measurements that you use to back up these statements?

Well of course you don’t have any. You know because you have spent the past number of years gaining the art, (knowledge and skills) to provide your club with these key elements that make good greens into great surfaces.

The R&A’s new Benchmarking service

BTME Harrogate product review

So what is the R&A’s benchmarking service? Basically it is a simple way of logging a Course Manager’s key
operational data for his club so that they can then monitor resource inputs
such as chemicals, irrigation, machinery usage and labour for their maintained surfaces.

This data is then processed and a ‘benchmark’ graph line is produced that can be used to judge year-on-year trends. This benchmark can also be judged, anonymously, against national average figures for all golf clubs registered with the system.

Harrogate Golf Greenkeepers Show BTME

Comment from Harrogate week – BTME, Clubhouse & Continue to Learn Latest news update from the BIGGA’s annual turfest Harrogate Week. I was planning to update my blog from the show each day, but as usual long discussions on golf course maintenance issues have got in the way. Of course all this talk makes you hoarse so lubrication of the vocal chords is also vital and time consuming!

First impressions, well it seemed to be quieter than usual on Tuesday and heaving yesterday. As expected all the talk is of the economic downturn and how incomes, budgets and jobs are going to be affected. There are worrying stories from Ireland of clubs shutting down and others putting greenstaff on a three-day week. Many clubs in the UK are experiencing membership non-renewals with reports of 40 to 50 memberships being lost. I have no doubt that once the spring renewal period is over there will be even higher losses than this.

Finding the right golf course consultant

What we need is a golf course consultant

I wonder how many times these words have been uttered in golf club ‘spike bars’ up and down the country over the last thirty years. It must be in the thousands by now. They many not have been as specific as that but along the same theme. “What we need is a new greenkeeper” (will be number one), a second opinion, someone who knows what they are doing, a qualified expert, a consultant, will be others.

Prepare your ground to get what you need

GET WHAT YOU WANT, no sorry ‘NEED’

The Rolling Stones song ‘You Can't Always Get What You Want’ contains the lyric ‘but if you try sometimes, well you just might find, you get what you need’

The message contained in this lyric is so important, get what you need not what you want!

Golf Course Manager or Head Greenkeeper

What’s in a name and does it matter?

In 1981 I was having a few pints with an opponent after a game of rugby and he asked me what I did for a living.

I said that I was a Greenkeeper, “oh one of those guys who cuts grass on a golf course” he retorted. (I was in fact the Course Manager at Sudbury Golf Club).

After mumbling something about it being a bit more involved than that, I asked him what he did. ”I’m a, Transparent Partition Maintenance Engineer”. After working it out “Oh one of those guys who cleans windows” I retorted.

Sustainable golf greens, the R&A, Poa annua and you

The R&A’s highly laudable drive toward best practices for golf courses uses a ladder as an analogy for showing progress toward a sustainable golf course, but do you know how high this ladder is?

A large part of this issue of Pitchcare (issue 18 April/May 2008) is given over to the much discussed and promoted subject of ‘sustainable golf’ and features organised, brave and forthright course managers who are striding up the rungs of sustainable progress.

More power them I say, I have never been in any doubt that firm, free-draining, true, fescue dominated stands are the only turf surfaces worth playing golf on. It is nothing new though, after all these keen sporting surfaces are as old as the game itself.

Kevin Munt Golf Consultancy launched

The Business of Golf Course Management

I have today launched my golf course consultancy business aimed specifically to aid greenkeepers, superintendents and and managers with their challenge of golf course maintenance.

This is a copy of the press release that went out to the golf industry: