After trying hopelessly to provide consistently great putting conditions year over year, the owner of a nine-hole golf course in Florida finally threw in the towel.
Ben Best, owner of Suncoast Golf Center, installed artificial turf on all nine greens and the practice green at the nine-holer in Sarasota that he has owned for eight years. Installation began last October and was completed in January.
Although he says it is cheaper to maintain synthetic greens, Best, who also is Suncoast's superintendent, said cost was not the driving force behind the decision to convert to carpet.
"The biggest reason was consistency," Best said. "I got tired of looking people in the eye and telling them 'Yes, I know the greens are not good right now.' I got tired of saying it."
Suncoast opened in 1997. When Best bought it nine years ago, he said there was as much bare dirt on the putting surfaces as there was grass.
"I took it from a diamond in the rough and turned the greens into something that were as good as any in the area," Best said.
"To call it a diamond in the rough when I bought it is giving it more credit than it deserves. The greens were 50 percent dirt and the practice range was all sand. The golf balls had no dimples left. They were that old. They were not one type, one brand or even one color. They had everything out there."
Each year since he bought the course, Best babied the greens throughout the year, but it never seemed to be enough. To replicate the same conditions he produced during the summer offseason, Best eventually turned to overseeding in the fall. That was great during the winter, but often caused problems throughout the late spring and summer.
"These are just old pop-up greens where the (native) soil was pushed up and boom, there's a green," he said. "The overseed looked good in winter, but the transition killed the greens. We had black mold, the overseed wouldn't die, we had nematodes."
Even after Best stopped overseeding, his challenges of replicating winter conditions throughout the summer continued.
"For four years, the overseed would come back on its own every winter," he said. "We'd bring the greens back every year, and every year they'd die.
"It was hard to get our greens where we wanted them to be, and it was impossible to keep them there."
Best hired a nearby superintendent to consult on a best course of action, before finally settling on synthetic greens.
"We were aerifying a green a week, verticutting," Best said.
"I was spending $9,000 every month just on maintaining greens. That's a lot of money. I looked at digging them up and putting in USGA greens. Artificial turf costs less. It's not cheap either, and there is still maintenance involved, but I don't have to worry about consistency."
Through his 40-year career in construction, Best already had installed many synthetic backyard putting greens, so the concept was one with which he already was familiar.
He hired golf course builder Justin Carlton, who also has experience in synthetic turf installation including construction of an artificial turf putting green at Old Palm in Palm Beach Gardens, to do the shaping.
The carpet is stretched and tucked and tacked so it holds contours like real grass. Unlike athletic fields that are packed with crumb rubber, Suncoast's greens are dressed with real sand.
The trueness that superintendents achieve with natural grass is not there with the synthetic surface, but the consistency is.
"There is some bounce and it plays like a new green that is only 25 percent broken in," Best said. "If you hit the ball with some spin, you can really do some things. If you hit it low, it's going to take off the back of the green.
"My advice to people is hit it high and you'll be fine."
And what do Suncoast's customers think, most like it, but Best knows that with synthetic turf, just like natural grass, you can't please all the people all the time.
"Ninety percent love it. They love the consistency," Best said. "They know that today it will play the same as it did yesterday, and tomorrow it will play the same as it did today."