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Over-seeding Warm Season Grasses
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By Will Bowden in Consultancy on 25th Jan 2012 8:00
Most golf course superintendents will agree that apart from the condition of the greens, most issues relating to the playability of their golf course are targeted at bunkers. Bunkers are invariably 'resource eaters'.
They swallow up more labour and money and cause more headaches than arguably any other golf course feature. Many golf clubs face a continual battle to balance the books and apportion a seemingly ever decreasing pool of resources to an ever increasing number of areas. In such situations it is critical to have an accurate process of tracking expenditure in relation to the management and resource requirements of one of the most maintenance hungry features of the golf course.
The demands regarding bunker maintenance are significant. They include daily raking, edging, trimming, reshaping, drainage enhancements, cleaning and replenishing sand etc. Bunkers are a constant drain on maintenance resources and a perennial source of subjective criticism that often leads to negative conjecture.
The use of a performance assessment system for managing bunkers would help to target expenditure and monitor condition. This system should provide an objective measure of bunker performance and condition across a golf course with the data generated being used to cross reference current condition and performance standards against predetermined targets/goals of the club. 
Bunkers should be assessed under the following scoring criteria:
1 Historical performance (a review over the past four years)
2 Strategic relevance and placement
3 Intensity of daily maintenance
4 Sand plugging potential
5 Drainage infrastructure (internal and external contouring)
6 Annual maintenance requirements
In carrying out the review the following sequence of steps can be followed :
1. Assemble a review team: I suggest that this is limited to two or three individuals and should include the Club Manager, Course Superintendent and if necessary an independent turf consultant.
2. Assign an historical performance score to the bunkers on each hole: This factor should be the only 'subjective' score within the bunker management system. The historical performance grade should represent perceived performance (as an average) over the past four years. The review team must discuss and assign a score for the historical performance of all the bunkers on each hole using a numbered grading system.
3. Score bunkers on a hole-by-hole basis: Although bunkers will be scored individually, grouping them to a hole will make the information generated through the bunker management scoring system far easier to review and digest at a later stage. Each bunker should be scored individually against the six scoring criteria. However it may be the case that renovation programmes are scheduled around holes rather than individual bunkers.
4. Prioritise holes/bunkers: Once completed the scores can be displayed in a number of ways:
a. A broad overview of the current situation relating to bunker performance and condition
b. This overview can then be broken down into a hole-by-hole format where current bunker performance can be cross-referenced against the goals and expectations of the club
c. Each bunker is individually detailed and scores for each of the six scoring criteria are detailed
This system allows the review team to gain a clearer appreciation of where the priorities lie and where the club should be investing resources to maximise their impact and success. Bunker maintenance is a costly exercise; outside of the greens and staff, bunkers take up more resources than any other area of the golf course. Therefore it is important that any future spending is targeted and focussed upon achieving maximum value for money under a controlled and systematic tracking process.
A bunker management system needs to be 'owned' by the club. Alongside demonstrating a proactive commitment and acknowledgement of maintenance issues to club staff and members, it allows for greater budgetary control and predictability in an area of golf course maintenance that can easily spiral out of control without a clear plan or system in place.
For more information on the SSDM Bunker Performance Review System contact: will.bowden@ssdm.co.nz or call: 021 475 941.
Website - www.ssdm.co.nz
Read more articles in Consultancy, by Will Bowden or from January 2012.
