Despite 1" of rain last night, this morning turned sunny, allowing us to continue on our projects. The forecast isn't looking great, with high winds and brutally low temperatures expected for the next few nights. We are starting on a tweak to #17 approach. As you know last year, we restored Donald Ross' swale in front of the 17th green. After a year of play, we decided to make a slight change to it. Rather than me try to explain it in words, look at my simple drawing below. We are reducing the slope into to swale, which will make the feature feel less dramatic than it does now.
Our main objective today is work on the practice tee. The artificial hitting mats were set aside and we ripped out the concrete slabs they sat on. We are shifting all of the mats to the far right of the tee and back (if you're standing in the parking lot looking at the tee). We are increasing the number of mats from 10 to 16. 8 of the mats will be sitting on what was the putting green. Also, the area that was the putting green is being leveled in order to make the area more suitable for practice. To level this area, we're able to use the old sand left over from the greens renovation projects on #12 and #14. I've always taken pride in the fact that we're always able to dovetail all of our projects together and save money and resources by repurposing materials from other projects. I will also say, we saved a tremendous amount of money by having the soil available to us that was removed from the employee housing location during site prep. By the end of the winter, the employee housing project will have saved us tens of thousands of dollars in not having to haul and purchase fill soil.
