Purple Tee's At Overlake

The idea for the Purple Tee’s at Overlake Golf & Country Club came out of a committee meeting last year when one of our members who liked the idea of a shorter course came to the meeting prepared with some information about the Tee it Forward initiative and some of their recommended yardages for players of varying abilities. It was met with some skepticism and indifference, as many golfers don’t like to do anything that would give the perception of making the course easier, but we wanted to at least look into it as it was sincerely brought up to help both older members and younger members enjoy the game.

Vampire Energy Loss

Although the ROI on new energy saving technologies is pretty quick and justifies the investment, cutting the "Vampire Energy Loss" is an easy way to start saving some money at your facility without having to spend any money to do so. Vampire Energy Loss refers to energy that supplies power to electronic devices and appliances while they are "off" or in "standby"mode. Energy loss equals money loss. How much are we talking here?

The International Energy Association estimated in 2007 that standby/Vampire Energy Loss produced 1% of the world's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. To put the figure into context, total air travel contributes less than 3% of global CO2 emissions.

Achieving ACSP Certification at Overlake GCC

Shortly after I accepted the Assistant Golf Course Superintendent’s position at Overlake Golf & Country Club, it was a goal of mine to guide the club through the process of becoming a Certified Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary through Audubon International. I had been involved with the program at other clubs and knew what a great tool it could be to highlight environmental excellence at Overlake.

The first section of the certification process, Environmental Planning, was challenging for me as it involves a lot of information gathering. This section requires a description of all of your site information and development of a general plan on how you will institute all of your environmental programs. It also sets up your plan for the subsequent five sections, so I wanted to devote significant time to it.

I was tempted at first to take on everything myself, but soon found out that it was just too time-consuming to complete all of the paperwork, institute new environmental programs and manage the staff to ensure we were maintaining exceptional playing conditions on a daily basis. While course conditions continued to improve, and major projects were being implemented on the golf course, I was a bit frustrated with how slowly the Audubon program was progressing. I finally came to the conclusion that, in addition to my day-to-day responsibilities of managing the course, there just weren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish this undertaking on my own.

2nd Assistant Superintendent Marcus Harness and Horticulturist Lacey Leinbaugh explaining the difference between native and exotic plants to the students of St. Thomas School