This past week has concluded the 2019 golf leagues at the muni. This time of year seems to always result in a drop in play at the golf course. Starting this weekend golfers can purchase 1/2 of their 2020 season pass and play the remainder of 2019. Then make the final payment in April of 2020 and play all of that golf season. Hopefully we see some additional interest in this promotion this year.
Mid week I finished the process of lining up a glow ball event that will be held on Saturday, October 5th. The event will be limited to the first 104 golfers and sponsored by the After Five Kiwanis. There will also be a chili cook off between Spencer Fire Department and the After Five Kiwanis. This event will be held annually, moving forward, and will benefit children in our community. The exact charity has not yet been determined.
Thursday afternoon we hosted the Spencer High School cross country meet. This is an annual event that falls on the Thursday after men’s league is completed. We host this event in order to be a positive partner with the school district. We don’t make any money during the day but it does give folks from outside our community to see our beautiful golf course. It’s very impressive watching all the young athletes compete in this event.
Irrigation continues to be on the agenda the past weeks. I repaired multiple valves and wiring issues around the golf course. There are only a few small repairs left to complete. Overall, the irrigation system is working about as well as a person could hope. All of the areas of poor irrigation coverage have been addressed. The repair hours have been quite substantial over the past couple of years.
The staff and myself have spent time cleaning sand traps during the mornings when we rake traps. There have been quite a few rocks that have worked to the surface and contaminated the sand. We have removed approximately three gallons of rocks from around the golf course. We will continue to work on this process each week. The vast majority of rocks have been removed.
We spent some time dragging the parking lot, filling in potholes, and doing the same to the cart paths around the golf course. The Street Division helped us out by adding road gravel a couple weeks ago. We will continue to drag the parking lot in order to keep the potholes and other low spots to minimum each week.
Another task has been the removal of sucker branches around a lot of the smaller trees around the golf course. These branches grow at ground level and show up every year. It usually takes us a handful of hours to address this issue. We have also been trimming some of the low hanging branches on the golf course and in Waterway Park.
Our regularly scheduled maintenance practices have taken up the remainder of the work week. Overall the golf course is in really nice shape as we head into the Labor Day weekend.
Spencer Municipal Golf Course 