green speed

When Cam Shaw wrote with a question about measuring smoothness and trueness, he mentioned that he’d searched my blog and didn’t find anything. “Wow,” I thought, “have I really written nothing about this?

The Brede equation is essential to my work. I often use the stimpmeter to measure the ball roll distance (green speed) of putting greens. But there’s a problem. It can take a long time to find an area flat enough to make the measurement. On some greens, there is so much slope that one cannot make an official measurement.

This story by Chris Tritabaugh starts with ambivalence about the stimpmeter, then goes on to explain what changed. These are the key results, with emphasis mine: Since I started stimping our greens every day, I cannot remember a complaint about greenspeed.

I get to see a lot of bermudagrass and zoysiagrass putting greens. In fact, most of my golf is played on one of those two surfaces. Sometimes people ask me about the ball roll on zoysia compared with roll on bermudagrass.

You may have seen a few posts about #rturf on my personal site. I’m writing about that topic over there so I don’t clutter up the ATC site with too much data analysis and computer code.

I was at Copenhagen Golf Club on Monday for seminars with the Danish Greenkeepers Association. See some photos of the day here. One of my presentations was about green speed—I called it Stimp Stats.

Last week I had a couple conversations about green speed. Green speed and surface hardness My column in the June 2018 issue of Golf Course Seminar magazine discusses the relationship between effective mowing height and green speed.

I was honored to speak at the 40th Congress of the Asociación Española de Greenkeepers in Seville. Organic matter In the 2016 article “Managing Organic Matter in Putting Greens,” Adam Moeller and Todd Lowe wrote this:

On August 23 at 4 a.m., Andrew McDaniel and I walked into a 7-11 in Fukuoka to get the latest issue of Weekly Golf Digest. Golf magazines in Japan are pretty amazing to begin with.

This week I’ve thought of a couple things about #ClipVol. First is the way I think of the data. I’ve shared a lot of charts about clipping volume, and as this growing season gets underway in the northern hemisphere, I wondered if I could describe it on an animated chart.