Divot Etiquette On Range

The driving range is a great place to hone your skills and tweak you swing as you so feel necessary. The driving range is an excellent amenity to have for this purpose.  Here at Bellevue we struggle every year with inadequate teeing surface area to accommodate the amount of golfers that use the range tee, usually in the evenings I have noticed.  The above photo was taken of the range tee yesterday which shows an abundance of divots being taken in one spot.  The bottom photo shows how we would prefer divots be taken, with a small gap between each divot.  This small gap will allow the grass to eventually creep back into the void and reduce the healing time needed to achieve 100% coverage of grass again.  Please consider doing this the next time you are on the range tee to allow the tee to stay in much better shape through the course of the season for everyone to enjoy.
Mike O'Neill, GCS

Tough Spring For The Irrigation System!

The abundance of irrigation breaks this spring is attributed to a long cold winter and an aging irrigation system.  The pipes in the ground are an old type of pvc that has a very thin wall and in turn gets very brittle with age.  The pipe in the ground is pushing 40 years old so we are starting to get more and more breaks as we start the system up.  We are at 16 sprinkler breaks and 5 main line breaks already this spring.  We also ran into problems during the recent hot stretch of weather not having the whole system working.  We ended up having to run tanks of water around the section of the course that is lacking the irrigation because of broken lines.

We are hoping we are finally getting ahead of the problems but every time we have a break, that takes away from the detail work we could be accomplishing on the golf course.

Mike O'Neill, GCS