So many things are on my mind about the executive courses and I would like to air some of them.
First and foremost, if you are a greenskeeper, be the best you can be and when you see them deteriorating, do something about it. Nothing that is broken gets better without proper attention.
However, the players have some responsibility here as well. The majority of golfers in The Villages see executive golf as an opportunity to have fun, but they don’t realize a few things, one when they actually hit the green on the drive. If you are lucky enough to hit the green, take the time to fix your divot, all those brown dots are from people not fixing them, and left unattended contributes to bad greens. And a few more contributing factors are people who push the golf cart on the greens, picking up debris from the fairways and dropping it on the greens, or worse yet people driving their golf cart over part of the greens. And for all you folks that have difficulty bending over and have a ball retriever on the end of your putter, when you place it in the cup, be careful to not catch the side of the cup, it damages the cup for others.
Many people in The Villages have investment properties and rely on good golf conditions to attract snowbirds. When these courses are in disrepair, some snowbirds may not return. All of us that are full time get to experience poor greens all summer long with the multitude of aerating that happens, which in my opinion never gives the greens time to root properly and thus you have what we are dealing with today. Or “may” be El Nino, but what I believe it comes from is cost cutting measures to get more for less, but now we are getting less for less, unless we say more for the additional cost being requested to repair something that may have been prevented.
Thus, other than the maintenance part, all of us Villagers can also do our part to make it better.
Dan Eastman is a resident of the Village of Fenney.
