D’ARCY RANCH TURFCARE DEPARTMENT
BUNKERS OR SAND TRAPS
One of our most challenging responsibilities on the golf course is bunker maintenance. We spend as many of our resources maintaining bunkers as we do maintaining greens and the greens are the most important aspect of the golf course. Bunkers receive a lot of attention for an area on the course that is classified as a hazard. I will briefly talk about our philosophy on bunker maintenance and focus mainly on consistency and playability of bunkers.
It is impossible to get every bunker to play the same. In order to get bunkers to all play the same they would have to be built exactly the same, have the same amount of sand, receive the same amount irrigation, have the same amount of sun, wind, rain and so on. Realistically this is just not going to happen on a golf course so we have to come up with a compromise.
What we need to do is work on the things we have control of such as, make sure the bunkers have adequate amounts of sand, they are raked daily, the edges are maintained appropriately and fairway bunkers play firmer than greenside bunkers. This is where we can run into some differences in which some greenside bunkers may be firmer than others and some fairway bunkers maybe softer than others. This is related to the different locations of the bunkers throughout the golf course.
In order to allow for good playability, it is important to have an adequate and consistent depth of sand throughout the bunker regardless of firmness or softness of the bunker. People who play a lot of golf say they can tell how they will play the bunker shot just by the way the sand feels under their feet, the only concern they have is if there is the same amount of sand under their golf ball. Our goal is to try to make sure that each individual bunker is consistent within itself and by doing this the bunker (hazard) will be fair to allow the golfer to hit a good shot.
We go through the bunkers every spring and continually monitor the sand depths and top them up as needed. We also encourage golfers to let us know if they find any bunkers that are in need of attention and we make sure they get attended to.
Kim Bodnar
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