This past weekend I was in charge of the proper maintenance and care of a putting green located on K-State’s Campus for my Hort 517 class (Golf/Sports Operations). This putting green is only 1,000 ft/sq and located behind Throckmorton Hall, just north of Call Hall. The green is normally taken care of by Ph.D student Zane Raudenbush, who does various extension and research projects for the University. He along with my Hort 517 Professor Jack Fry have created a research project for the class and I. The project and why I was taking care of the green this weekend is that of measuring the green’s speed.
Green speed is a very tricky subject, even though measuring the speed is simple, establishing a certain speed can be quite challenging. The course I work at out at Colbert Hills under Matt Gourlay CGCS has his green speeds at a blistering 10.5’ to almost 11’ speed. Now if you don’t know how to determine speed, keep it simple the higher the number the faster the green. The way we measure the speed is with a tool called a “stimp meter”.A stimp meter is an extruded aluminum bar, 36 inches long, with a V-shaped groove extending along its entire length. To use the device one must lay the bar flat on the greens surface (prefarbaly on the flattest part of the green) and place a golf ball in the grooved section, being gentle slowly raise the bar up just until the ball rolls down the bar and onto the green. Do this 3 times with 3 golf balls, and then repeat the same exercise going the opposite direction. This will insure to weed out any descrepancies during the stimp process. Step off the balls roll, and the number of feet you get or bar lengths is the total length and stimp of the roll.Stimping is the easy part, trying to get a certain speed is the hard part. The way we are testing this is by dividing the green into thirds. One-third will be mowed only at 1/8 of an inch, Second-third (Middle) is mowed, brushed, mowed, rolled, lastly the third portion of the green is strictly mowed and then rolled. Each third takes a delicate hand and professional operation of machinery including mowers, rollers, and stimp. Seems simple that anyone can do theses task but in my field of study not even a person whose worked a golf course before can run a device properly. This is okay, because the more we do the same treatments the better practice we get and the better we get at operating. Our hypothesis for the experiment is that the double-cut, brushed, rolled portion of the green will roll the fastest at the end of 4 weeks. Only time will tell and a conclusion blog will be drafted.
