This summer, Cooper Hall (a 5-year employee of HCC) is completing his internship at Highlands CC as a Turfgrass Management student at NC State University. As part of the internship, the student is required to do some form of a project. This was a great opportunity for me, to do something I always wanted to do... data collection! Every morning, Cooper collects the grass clippings from the mowers after the practice green is mowed. The weight of the clippings are measures and recorded to understand how our practices drive growth. In addition to that, he'll use our GS3 ball (shown below) to record the daily green speed, surface smoothness and surface trueness. The next measurement he'll record is the daily putting green firmness, that is measured using the drop test device below. The GS3 ball is placed inside the drop test device and it measures the depth of impact the ball makes when it hits the putting green.
With the above data recorded, Cooper then factors in more information like weather data, rain totals, and agronomic practices performed that morning, like whether or not we rolled, double cut or irrigated the night prior. By collecting all of this information, we will be able to quantify precisely the benefit to playing conditions based on our maintenance practices and outside influences. We'll be able to graph things like season long putting green speed and gain more insight into the return on our investment when it comes to the maintenance practices we do. Perhaps we could save resources by not doing a particular practice if we aren't seeing as much benefit to it as we initially thought.
Clipping Yield is measured daily.
Surface Firmness Device
The USGA's GS3 Ball
Above and below show you the measurements that the GS3 ball provides. The ball is rolled off a stimpmeter just as you would if you were measuring green speed with regular golf balls. Smoothness is a measurement that records the up and down movement of the ball as it rolls across a green while trueness measures the amount of side to side motion of the ball. For more information on the USGA's GS3 ball CLICK HERE!
