[Patrick_Mucci]

Are modern day green chairman vestigial organs ?

Has the position becomed staffed with political rather then qualified candidates ?

In general, or in particular, have green chairman over the last 20-40 years been responsible for more bad work then good ?

What does it take to be an outstanding green chairman ?
What are examples of misquided green chairman ?

[cary lichtenstein]

Each year we elect a new President. That person automatically becomes the new green chairman.

It doesn't work. The good golfers all complain, but they are in the great minority. Most everybody else really doesn't know the difference between a well manicured course and an average course.

They just want to get over the waters and keep out of the traps. And get to the lunch buffet.

[Mike_Young]

Pat,
Yes the green chairman has become a political position.  It seems that most are afraid to go against what is recommended by the super and therefore things become more and more out of balance.  Now there are exceptions.  Our committee is off the record picked by the GM so that he has a group that will do as he says.  The club becomes employee driven instead of member driven and whamo next thing you know you'll have 5 chefs in the kitchen and no money for the golf course.

[gookin]

As a recently appointed Green Chairman I am very interested in your topic. I hope I will do a good job, but only time will tell.  Unlike most jobs people take,  I have no formal training and there is no job description. I am working for several hundred members who pay their dues so their opinion matters.  I am following a legacy of Green Chairmen who basically did what they wanted.  My reason for taking the job is that our club has given me 35 years of great pleasure and I want to give some of it back.  Also with a very small amount of effort we can go from being very good to great.

What have I done in six months?
1) Established a Mission Statement and communicated it to the members.  At the heart of the Mission Statement is to restore and preserve the original architectural integrity of our Seth Raynor design.
2) Begun to develop written standards for course maintainence.
3) Initiated a new focus on turf excellance.
4) Initiated a long range planning project to execute our Mission Statement.
5) Developed a member presentation to communicate these activities to the membership. We have held five presentation which have reached close to half our membership.
6) Developed a personal plan for education reaching out to many resources like our superintendent, the USGA, our advising architect, and GCA.

If you can't tell I am excited about this job and am very eager to learn from others' experiences.  I can't wait to read what the GCA says on this topic.

[michael j fay]

This is a wonderful topic!

Most Country Clubs operate on the Chair system. A person wrangles theri way onto the Board and if their standing with the President is strong enough they are given the responsibility of Green Chaiman. They appoint a Committee and it is a new day. Anything that happened before is out the window and a new interpretation of the game of golf is proffered by someone who usually has no clue.

An example:

CC in Connectict, old partially Devereaux Emmett course by the mid '90's is a mutt. Trees abound, turf grass has suffered from 15 years of idiot green chairmen and neglect on the part of the Superintendent (who had drug and alcohol problems yet was protected by the Green Chairmen), drainage problems of huge magnitude and a design that had two of the worst par three greens in existence.

Enter a relatively new member, who had served as Green Chairman at another local course for eight years. A diligent fellow with knowledge of the situation and an ability to let the moronic comments on the improvements by idiot members run off his back.

He takes charge of the situation, passes a long term plan and starts to make the improvements. He takes down 350 trees, immediately improving the turf grass, he replaces 11 wooden bridges that washed out twice a year with beautiful, useful permanent bridges and gets the two bad greens redesigned to be playable. During this period he is hounded by a group of long-term members who are lousy golfers and are most interested in getting their carts as close to the greens and bunkers as possible. He fixes a century old flooding problem and assists in finding a grade A+ Superintendent to care for the grounds.

After five years he has the place looking and playing better than ever before. The new regime takes over and decides that he is no longer to hold the position (mainly because he is in their eyes an "Outsider"). They replace him with a good guy who has worked with him for five years on the project, all is well.

Now, the new , new regime repaces the replacement with an idiot, who knows nothing of golf, golf courses or turf grass, someone who has gotten up the chairs by never shutting up although he never had anything cogent to say.

Last year. this moron, with the assistance of another no-nothing, plant 40 or so cheap. ugly pines, many in places where they were recently removed. When asked about the effect these trees would have on the course the new Chair said that is the problem of the Superintendent.

My question was: What don't you understand about photo-synthesis? His answer was : What does a photo lab have to do with a golf course?

[Patrick_Mucci]

Michael,

I've seen that process repeated all too often.

Shouldn't competent green chairman serve for a minimum of five years ?  Two years to learn the ins and outs of the job, agronomy, architecture, budgeting, etc., etc..  And then three or more years to maintain or improve the conditions and architecture (shrunken greens, mis-aligned tees, indiscriminate tree plantings) ?

Shouldn't they outlast Presidents who usually serve for one, two or three year terms ?

[Joel_Stewart]

I'm now serving on he green committee for a very large club with 45 holes of golf.  I knew it would be very political but what I have learned is that every club has politics, many of which are vicious.  Our club has recognized just over the last few years the importance of qualified members on the green committee.  
 
Maybe I am underestimating the qualifications of green committee members but I doubt there are that many qualified members to serve on green committees.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Joel,

Agreed, quality, not quantity is the key element.

[DPL11]

Michael,

That story is far too common.

The best situation is to have a chairman for at least five years with a vice-chairman, chosen by the chairman, below them who will take over at the end of their tenure.

Clubs need to adopt a "golf course standards" and masterplan into their bylaws to keep knuckleheads who get into power under control. The clubs who have gone this route have been very successful at maintaining consistancy, ie. Huntington Valley.

The best chairman that I have worked for over the years, let me as the supt. do my job, and had also educated themselves about the course's architectural history.

It only takes a very short period of time for an idiot to screw up a club that had been doing just fine for a 100 years.


Doug

[cary lichtenstein]

I chuckeled when I read a few of these. The danger of regimes taking control of a club, forming clicks and running the club with an iron fist for better or worse, is only too real.

In some cases, it works out for the better. I have seen the opposite. Presidents take control, and they believe, because they are President, and were a successful doctor, homebuilder, car dealer, etc., they can adapt, and run the greens committee.

The greens superindendent strokes them, and overnight they become geniuses.

They appoint all their clicky friends to the greens committee, no one under a 12 handicap.

When our club selected new sand for the traps, they put a soft sand in trap #1, and a softer sand in trap #2. I remember a 26 handicap arguing with me at the top of his lungs that the softer sand was the best since it was easier for him to get out of it with his Alien Sand Wedge.

When I told him that both sand were way too soft, he called me a golf snob, and walked away.

That is how clubs are run, and guess what, they put in the soft sand. Go hit your head against a wall, you get better results.

[tonyt]

Some of the better maintained and sensibly run courses in country areas around Australia are those where a very long standing member has had the post forever and deserves through his long term commitment to the small club to hold the position until he be dead.

He has no pressure to perform or leave his mark in a short space of time, and has had decades to learn from his mistakes and see the benefits of good decisions and shortcomings of the bad ones. This is as close as it gets sometimes to the old classic courses that are still great that have had well meaning and benevolent dictators as protectors from the ignorant, and the members that come and go.

[TEPaul]

Let's hear from the contributors not horror stories--let's hear something postive. For starters, what makes for a good green committee member? What kinds of club members should the committee be looking for to populate its committee? What makes an effective green chairman? What should clubs be looking for from their green committees.

David B. Gookin gave a good rundown of what his club is doing now.

My club has just done a good restoration and the green committee is trying to put into place a master plan to follow with the course now and in the future both architecturally and maintenance-wise. My club has a committee structure to it, it's always been that way and probably always will. What the green committee needs, in my opinion, is a process to follow, and that process needs to be formalized within the club to create continuity from committee to committee as time goes by.

[Patrick_Mucci]

TEPaul,

Making a good carriage to move forward with the long range program is great, but if you don't have the horses to pull it, you're wasting your time.

You need capable, knowledgeable people, and there just aren't that many of them.

And frequently, when you get some good people, they tend to be outnumbered, and outvoted at the committe level.

[Mike_Trenham]

You need a small committee with very minimal turnover (maybe a czar), leading and supporting a very capable superintendent that you are all scared of alienating so that consistency is maintained and you don't try to mico-manage him/her.   No matter how good your committee and plans are without a very good super you have zero chance of sucess.

Think about your committee like that of the board of directors of a company, it is your job to set the direction make sure the right people are in place, and hold them accountable to figuring out the the details and executing.  Too many club committee members want to play superintendent, designer etc. rather than lead.

[Don_Mahaffey]

Thinking out of the box a bit, but do you even need a green's committee? Why not hire a qualified supt. who has some knowledge of the course's history and architecture and give him quantitative standards to evaluate his performance. Hire a consultant, a Dave Wibur type, to assure that the science being used is solid. Have an architect on retainer and use him to make any changes to the course. And, use the USGA green section to evaluate and compare the course conditions to other regional courses. All trained educated professionals with their reputations and livelihoods at stake. Just a thought. Seems like it may be better then putting the course in the hands of someone trained in an entirely different field then golf course management.

[ForkaB]

Don

With all due respect, your thoughts are equivalent to saying--why do we need a President of the USA?  Why not just hire the best Secretaries of Defence, State, Health, Education etc. and let them do what they are trained to do?

Proper governance, whether it be at a golf club or a multinational corporation or a nation-state requires both checks and balances and integrative, overarching leadership.

To paraphrase an old truism, golf courses are far too important to be left to the turf heads.....

All the best

Rich

[TEPaul]

It's hard for me to believe but I actually agree with Rich Goodale's post above, at least to a large extent.

It's not that a super supplemented by some professional help, for instance from the likes of Dave Wilbur or an architect couldn't do a helluva job. Day in and day out they could do a far better job, in my opinion, without constant off the wall interference from committees and such. But the problem is what job is it they'd be doing and who's going to define what that will be? Is Don suggesting they're going to define that job and the look and smell of it for the membership? I don't think so unless they want to take on a world of flak from the membership and probably end up all getting fired!

One of the assets but also very much the drawback of a green committee is they are the ones who take the flak from the membership which is almost inevitable unless the club somehow manages a massive effort that generally takes years to do to actually define in detail what that job on the course will be.

By far the best example of that it HVGC in Philadelphia. It took a couple of extraordinary visionaries literally years to bring the membership along with massive education and cajoling to get an effective product on that course which really is unusual and impressive in this day and age.

I once asked HVGC's really good super if I could tap him for general advice on a maintenance prescription and to my amazement he said not unless I got the permission of the club to ask him because without them there was no possible way in Holy Hell he ever could've done any of this.

So, in a way Rich is right. Even in the best of circumstances with a great master plan for the course both architecturally and maintenance-wise if the club through it's green or golf committee can't effectively protect their superintendent from piece-meal flak from the club's membership they haven't even begun to do their job correctly, in my opinion!

A good and effective green committee just like a good and effective master plan is basically a two-side coin. They have to have a good idea of the right thing to do for the course (the "ideal maintenance meld") but they also have to take the flak from the membership to get it defined and done.

That's half their job, taking the flak---and unfortunately the very reason they can become so political and consequently at which point things start to go awry on the course.

I hate to tell you folks, but if any golf club is going to do a good and effective job with their golf course the first thing they have to do is bring the membership along to what it is they’re going to do. That should always come first!

There’s basically 2-3 ways clubs try to effect significant and hopefully positive change and a positive long-term direction---they can try to do it by going around their membership or they can try to beat them into submission both of which inevitably creates massive discontent and even a revolution or you can bring them into it, educate them as to the logic of what you’re trying to do and get them to go along with it going in.

You all can talk about czars or committees or whatever--it doesn’t really matter. Either way any club has to deal with its membership as to what it’s going to do on the course, and again, in my opinion, it’s better to try to do that first and so that’s the place to begin to discuss this subject intelligently.

Having said that, it is my experience that a club can produce a good product by not bringing  their membership into the process first and if it really is a good product for that course architecturally and maintenance-wise (“ideal maintenance meld”) they’ll almost always like it when they get to play it. But that way you’ll be going through a couple of years of membership flak and adversity. Or you can bring them into first by taking a lot of time to explain the logic of it to them and get their approval going in!

The latter is just called “education”, it takes time and effort but there are a number of tricks and techniques that work time and again that way with basically any membership. And that’s the job of the club and its committees. I see no way at all that a super and a support team of professionals can do that effectively without some real help from the club.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Don Mahaffey,

I'd agree that the smaller the committee the better.

But, many clubs today want to put as many members as possible on the committee so that every faction is represented, and therein lies the rub, as the numbers increase the quality and productivity of the committee decreases.

And, selecting the best chairman is often a political rather then a prudent choice.

[gookin]

Don,

You need all the things you mentioned plus a green committee. If your experts had to interface with the members day in and day out they would certainly find another place to work.  And a five year term should be the minimum.

[Don_Mahaffey]

Rich,
I'm not suggesting a club do away with it's BOD, just wondering if it would be possible for a club to operate without a formal green's committee.

The employees would need to be guided by club policies and operational goals and I'm not suggesting employees form the master plan.

What negative experiences I've had with green's committies have come form the micro-management where I was directed to do things I felt were not in the best interest of the course.

I believe the best method is clear mandates about how the club wishes the course to play and then letting the trained professional do their job.

[A_Clay_Man]

I realize this is a specific situation and is likely completely different from the private scenarios Pat asks about,but..

At Pacific grove, the golf club had it's own green committee, with absolutley no authority to demand anything. Yet, we were the ones who played the course every day and knew it probably better than the superintendant, because he was deligator. So, when we did make suggestions, to aspects that we felt he may have over-looked, or didn't realize were out of control, he accepted them and made appropriate changes. We were careful to limit our suggestions and to prioritize them because otherwise it was all way too subjective.

This is perhaps the type of 'laize faire', Don is speaking about.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Dave Schmidt,

EVERYTHING.

It's a formula for chaos.

Referendum on every hair brained issue that the membership can come up with.

Do you have any experience serving on Green Committees ?

[ForkaB]

Don

Agreed.

The ideal situation is where you have a green committee which knows enough about the subject and is strong enough of character to not be cowed (by either the green staff or members who think they know better) and also has enough confidence to hire and MOSTLY leave alone good staff.

Unfortunately, these sorts of people are few and far between.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Dave Schmidt,

It doesn't cut both ways.

Supporting your position by extrapolating from two fictional movies is a worthless endorsement.

Dictators usually choose and groom their successors.

It's worked very well at many of the courses this site reveres.

Opening up referendums based on membership whims is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard.

Serve some time on a Green Committee and then tell me what you think.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Dave Schmidt,

Your suggestion would expand the size of the green committee to the entire membership, creating total chaos.

My suggestion is to reduce the size of Green Commitees, staffing them with only qualified individuals, even if that's down to one person.

Your lack of experience in serving on a green committee undermines your understanding of how they operate.

Like many things in life, like sex, we have to experience them to understand them and know what we're talking about  

[Tags:]

Tags:

[Tags:]

Tags:

Call to undefined function theme_linktree()