Managing Early Spring Traffic in Golf and Sports Turf

By Tyler Carr, Ph.D.

We recently had our first taste of spring in Ohio. The warmer temperatures help turfgrass managers prepare their surfaces for spring and upcoming play. They also bring out the coaches and golfers who are itching to ramp up use. This is where golf course superintendents and sports field managers face a dilemma – these surfaces are built for play, but they oftentimes must sustain play until the growing season ends in the fall. We are aware that turfgrass cannot adequately recover this time of year, so how do we set expectations so these surfaces can succeed all season long?

Building your case with data is a good place to start. When it comes to discussing the ability for turfgrass to recover throughout the season, I often revert to growth potential (GP) models. Growth potential, while not perfect, is a model that estimates turfgrass growth based on temperature. For cool-season turfgrasses, maximum GP (100%) occurs at an average temperature of 68 °F. Based on the 7-day forecast for Columbus, Ohio (March 25-March 31), the average temperature is predicted to be 52.4 °F, leading to a GP of 30%. The GP equation can be cumbersome, but you don’t need to calculate GP. With average temperature for a time period (day, week, month, etc.), you can determine GP from Table 1 or Figure 1 below.

You can also observe normal GP graphed for any location on the Asian Turfgrass website (Figures 2-4). If you’re considering warm-season turfgrass, you these figures will also show its growth potential compared to cool-season species.

In addition to suboptimal growing conditions during the spring, rain showers during this time causes more issues. Research has found that high soil moisture has a negative impact on athletic field traffic tolerance. In a silt-loam soil, turfgrass coverage was reduced four times faster under high soil water content (30-37%) compared to low (6-13%) and medium (12-19%) soil water contents (Dickson et al., 2018) (Figure 5). By allowing traffic on a surface soon following a few inches of rainfall, you may end up losing more playable days later in the season.

Rotating high-traffic areas, will limit the need to renovate those areas throughout the season. This takes effective planning and communication between you (the turfgrass manager) and the non-turfgrass manager decision makers (general manager, greens committee, school board, city council, etc.). First, it helps to document the high-use areas at your facility. This can be as simple as developing a catalog of photos of these areas with dates and possibly other information (turfgrass coverage estimate, number of events, surface hardness, soil moisture content, etc.). If you have access to a drone, these “birds-eye” photos can help visualize high-use areas (Figure 6). While we often strive to collect data to justify our decisions and needs, when it comes to traffic, photos can provide as much (or more) evidence than a graph that may be difficult to interpret by non-turfgrass managers.

Once you have identified high-traffic areas, or if you know where high-traffic areas typically occur, work with the turfgrass users to develop practical, actionable solutions that are easy to implement. This could be as simple as requesting coaches to “move practice drills 5 yards weekly” or using signage to direct golf cart traffic (Figure 7). Importantly, follow up periodically to assess if these actions are improving turf conditions.

Tyler Carr, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor and Turfgrass Extension Specialist in the Department of Horticulture and Crop Science at The Ohio State University.