Doing A Good Turn Daily

The bilingual directional diagram is now front and center on all greensmowers, and other needed tools are at the ready, too.

Rotating the directions in which greens are mowed, and paying constant attention to removing weeds and repairing ball marks and divots, are all basic to good grounds-keeping practices. But too often, these good intentions are abandoned in the crush to keep up with a workload, or because communications on exactly what’s expected are poor.

To make sure all of its grounds crew workers stay  “on the same day,” the Course & Grounds department at The Kansas City (Mo.) Country Club (KCCC), headed by Greens Superintendent Loren Breedlove, now operates under a charting system that specifies the daily direction for mowing greens during the golf season. The chart, with days listed in both English

and Spanish, is mounted at the center of the control bar for all greensmowers (see photo detail), giving all operators instant access, while on the course, to remember the exact direction for each day’s cut. “We’ve found this allows us to more consistent with the cut from green to green and day to day,” says Breedlove.

The control bars for all of the greensmowers at KCCC now also have a knife and divot repair tool attached to them, so these tools are handy for operators when they need to tend to any weeds, divots or ball marks they may find while mowing the greens.

“Having the mowing direction diagram, along with the knife and divot repair tool, attached to the greensmowers makes these tools more accessible to the operator,” says Breedlove. “This has helped us maintain the consistency of the greens, and has also helped to improve efficiencies by reducing the downtime [needed to] look for necessary tools.”