From Cooperstown and beyond

One of the givens of this job is travel. Ours is a national (more accurately, an international) association and business, so it follows that on occasion, the members of the GCM staff are going to have to hit the road to explore and research the stories and events that are important to golf course superintendents.

Those travels seldom elicit much sympathy from those around us, and with good reason, I guess. Most of the time we get to visit some pretty awesome places and meet some pretty excellent people, which makes the time away from home and the inevitable challenges of modern American travel a little bit easier to take.

A case in point was a three-day trek I took at the end of last week to Cooperstown, N.Y., for an event on bio-nutrition and bio-fertility products for turfgrass hosted by LebanonTurf. Sure, there have been sexier topics for a symposium and the trip involved an early-morning wake-up on one end (earlier than most superintendents get up) and a late-night return on the other. But the setting was fantastic (upstate New York is out of this world at this time of year), the company was marvelous and, yes, I did get to scratch one thing off my bucket list with a visit to the Baseball Hall of Fame (proof of said visit is above).

I'll have a more complete report on the LebanonTurf event later in the week. Today, I'll round out this post with a few updates to our super blogger list that we've been maintaining since the early days of this blog. Neither are true superintendent blogs per se, but both are geared toward the superintendent and the business of golf course management.

Richardgolf.com is a blog put together by Ray Richard, a former certified superintendent with more than 20 years of experience in golf construction and renovations. The blog gets into the nitty gritty of golf course construction, with posts focused on things such as bunker floors, pond dredging and material testing.

Super blogger No. 2 comes to us courtesy of the Chicago District Golf Association and that organization's turfgrass program. Sent to us by Nick DeVries, who is a research assistant with the CDGA, the blog is an invaluable tool for turfgrass managers in the Chicagoland area, with updates on current conditions, downloadable info sheets and a link to an active Twitter account (@TurfResearch).

Both blogs can also be accessed through our master list of blogs on the far right side of this page.

Comments

[Ray Richard]

Scott-Thanks for the kind words and link to Richardgolf.com. Thankfully there is plenty to discuss in the golf construction world.