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John Reitman

By John Reitman

Top 10 TurfNet stories of the year

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Carlos Arraya was named Superintendent of the Year at last year's Golf Industry Show.

The year 2019 was a memorable year in the golf business, even if some would like to forget it. It seems like 2019 was the year in which many people and places came out against pesticides, including many that are used on golf courses. Lawsuits and use bans made headlines nearly every week, and the golf industry continued its slow, steady retraction toward that elusive market equilibrium.

We have compiled a list of the top-10 most-read stories of 2019 from the pages of TurfNet. Click the headline to read the full text of each story.

10. TurfNet turns 25

Armed with little more than a freshly inked monthly print newsletter, a $20 bill in his pocket, and a blank slate for ideas to come, Peter McCormick filed the incorporation papers for TurfNet on February 1, 1994. His initial goal was to not be one of the 90% of new businesses that fail within the first five years. With the support, participation and intellectual investment of forward-thinking superintendents and commercial members, TurfNet made it. In spades.

9. Brewing brothers share passion for beer

As a former golf course superintendent, Dan Miller is accustomed to the pursuit of perfection. Nowadays, as the owner of Mighty River Brewing Co., in Windsor, Colorado, Miller exhibits the same quest for excellence in brewing the nearly 15 different beers his family-owned and operated business has been churning out since it opened last fall.

8. Managing the world’s most famous field is serious business

Since Warren Harding occupied the White House almost 100 years ago, playing in the Rose Bowl - the game and the stadium - has been a dream for countless kids across the country. It's a legacy turf superintendent Will Schnell takes seriously at the world's most iconic stadium that opened in Pasadena, California in 1923.

7. Autonomous mowers help cut costs

There was a time when golf course superintendents could not envision entrusting putting surfaces to autonomous mowers. But 12 months after incorporating the technology into his day-to-day routine at the Presidio Golf Club in San Francisco, Brian Nettz cannot imagine ever going back to walk mowing greens.

6a. OSU research helps monitor greens conditions

Putting green quality is the measuring stick by which golf course superintendents are measured. At Ohio State University, associate professor Ed McCoy, Ph.D., has developed a simulation model that helps turf managers monitor organic matter accumulation, decomposition and dilution and provides a way to manage organic matter on a site-specific basis.

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Lee Butler (left) and Jim Kerns, Ph.D., say the business of turfgrass pathology is pretty good thanks to golfer demand to produce increasingly faster putting surfaces.

6b. Pushing conditions? NCSU researchers say enough is enough

When it comes to pushing turf to please golfers, Butler and Jim Kerns, Ph.D., associate professor of turf pathology, believe that science and superintendents have gone about as far as they can go. The demands that golfers place on superintendents to produce championship conditions every day - or else - are a threat to the sustainability of the turf and the game itself.

5. Glyphosate ban in Miami should be wake-up call

No one should have been surprised earlier this year when the city of Miami approved a resolution banning the use of herbicides containing glyphosate on city property. The ban affects city works and contractors working on behalf of the city. The PR campaign to stop the use of such pesticides is well organized, much more so than any efforts to save them.

4. EPA says glyphosate does not cause cancer

In the PR war being waged against glyphosate, no one can accuse the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of buckling to public opinion. As the debate wears on about whether the world's most popular weed killer causes cancer, the EPA reaffirmed its findings from 2017 that there is no evidence to support claims that glyphosate is a carcinogen.

3. Golf hasn’t found the bottom yet

The definition of purgatory is a place where the souls of sinners suffer and atone for their misdeeds in life before going to heaven. Like the ghost of Jacob Marley who wears his burdens in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the golf business has been going through its own version of perdition for several years. contraction, the golf industry might be stuck in this state of limbo for much longer than anyone ever thought possible.

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Dan Dommer of Ozaukee Country Club in Mequon, Wisconsin is the recipient of the 2019 TurfNet Technician of the Year Award.

2. Dommer wins Golden Wrench

The TurfNet Technician of the Year Award is given annually to a golf course mechanic who excels at a variety of tasks associated with maintaining the golf course. The criteria on which the recipient is determined might need updating after Dan Dommer of Ozaukee Country Club in Mequon, Wisconsin, won this year's award. Besides excelling as a mechanic in a 100-plus-year-old shop at this historic 1922 William Langford-Theodore Moreau design, Dommer mows and topdresses fairways and fills in wherever else he is needed.

1. Arraya wins Super of the Year

Personal tragedy caused Carlos Arraya to question whether he had made the right career choice by becoming a golf course superintendent. If he ever has those thoughts again, Arraya, the director of agronomy and grounds at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis, probably has a future as a motivational speaker. That tragedy, the death of his son, Isaih, in a car accident in 2016, was the impetus for some honest introspection and sobering changes to the way he manages his life and his team as the 2018 PGA Championship loomed at Bellerive.

Edited by John Reitman






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