Dog days of….winter

The golf season will be here soon! No, seriously, it will. Hard to believe given the frigid temps and recent snowfall. But have faith. In the meantime, we are hard at work preparing for the season. New Website At long last I was able to dedicate the time to building out a shiny new website from the ground up. The original site certainly needed a face lift, but more importantly, it lacked the functionality we need. Feel free to poke around – all the 2022 rates are updated along with the most recent events. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter; we will be posting course updates, conditions, and special events throughout the season! Updates to the course After most people had shifted to hunting season, we stayed busy improving the course throughout November and December. Notably we built and plugged a new black tee box on #2. It sits on the berm between the creek and the left side pond on #1. It stretches the hole an additional 25 or so yards and will serve as the back teeing location for Thursday league as well. We also started the process of building proper forward tee boxes on all par 4’s. The existing boxes don’t offer much relief – the new teeing areas will give golfers of all abilities, and the youngsters, a fighting chance on the longer holes. We completed the box on #2 and will move on to #6 and #4 in the spring. And last but not least, with the help of John Thomas Excavating, we finally finished up the black tee box on #9. It sits up on the hill in the field behind the original tees and offers amazing views! We will be building out the cart path during the spring and hope to have it ready for play by June or July. New Parking Lot With increased traffic, it was an absolute necessity that we created additional safe parking. Once again, enter John Thomas and his son. We expanded the existing ‘auxiliary’ parking lot substantially and brought some big boulders in to define the space. This spring we will begin planting along the back side to shield the area from #1. The old #1 blue tee was sacrificed for the parking lot, but it has long been our plan to make significant changes to that hole. Most have probably noticed that we extended the white tee forward and along the creek while also adding a small area to push the tee back – those will both be opened this spring. The rest of our plan on #1 is a touch more complicated but we will be tackling as soon possible this spring. Stay tuned for updates! Maintenance Work At long last, we are caught up on equipment projects. As you can imagine, properly operating equipment is the lifeblood of golf course maintenance. We have made significant expenditures over the last 4 years to update and add necessary equipment while giving the entire fleet much needed TLC. So this winter we were able to focus on preventative maintenance! New paint jobs on equipment, reels, decks, bedliners etc. and small engines were torn down and rebuilt. And of course our grinders were busy tuning reels and bedknives. We do have two additional mowers to add to the fleet this spring – another large area fairway unit and a large Toro rough mower Last but Not Least…..Fairway Freddie! And last but certainly not least we are pleased to announce the Freddie Amos Williams III (aka Fairway Freddie) will be joining the team March 1. His experience on the staff at Dorset Field Club will be invaluable – and don’t worry, he is a master of setting ‘challenging’ pins! That’s all for now. But I promise I will keep the updates rolling as we move towards the start of the 2022 season….it will be here before you know it!