JULY–AUGUST 2004 COVER STORY

GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT

Designing Natural Grass Tees With Function and Form

By Mike Ashley

Before veteran golf center owner Dennis Tull opened his second range in 1989 in Shawnee Mission, Kan., he surveyed customers at his original facility in nearby Lenexa and came away with one definitive conclusion: Grass tees were the most important amenity he could offer in the eyes of the folks who filled his tee lines.

“For a couple of years, I had interviewed all our customers…basically asking, ‘Hey, if we built something new and different, what would you want?’” Tull recalls. Customers overwhelmingly voiced their preference for grass tees.

So Tull designed the second Smiley’s Golf Complex with 40 artificial turf mats and 140 grass stations, 70 on each side of the arced tee line that measures 300 yards wide. Tull estimates that more than 90 percent of customers choose the grass tees over the mats, and he has enough space to keep them all happy.

The design of Tull’s tee line is illustrative of a trend that developed in the 1980s as golf ranges began courting the “serious” golfer. As the industry matured, range developers and owners found that more golfers were looking for quality practice facilities—and were willing to pay for that quality, including better range balls, short game practice areas and most of all, grass tees.

“Most golfers have the perception that hitting off grass tees is superior to hitting off artificial turf,” says Tom Mathews, principal of Dominion Golf Group, a Midlothian, Va.-based provider of golf range management and development consulting services. “Even though the quality of the artificial turf mats is such that they are very acceptable, you still need the grass. Even if it’s a limited area, then at least in your advertisements, promotions and any kind of written material, you can say you have grass tees. That perception is important.”

More Land Needed
The first consideration in building grass tees—at either a new or existing range—is land availability, a concern to which most owners and developers are keenly attuned. Grass tees require more land than mats because the grass stations have to be rotated to protect the turf, giving it time to recover from the high concentration of use.

“I don’t recommend anything less than 40,000 square feet, and if you can get 80,000 [square feet] or 2 acres, that’s the optimum,” says golf course architect Lester George, president of George Golf Design Inc. in Richmond, Va. “About 40,000 square feet for a public driving range would be an absolute minimum, about 400 by 100 [feet] deep, and probably 35 to 36 slots. But that’s very expensive when you’re talking about maintained turf with a lot of management and control.”

Developing grass tees in an area that size—depending on the topography, grass selection (seed versus sod) and irrigation—can cost anywhere between $50,000 to $120,000, notes George.

That’s why the planning, design and execution are so important. Most ranges can’t afford mistakes.

Says Tull: “I always tell guys looking to get into the driving range business, ‘plan for future growth.’ In other words, you don’t have to build it all right now but make sure you’ve got the land so you can extend your hitting area when you need to.”

Traffic Control
BMathews says the minimum depth for grass tees is 84 to 120 feet, which will produce between 21 and 30 4-foot strips of teeing area, allowing for a rotation of 4 feet back each day. Generally, turf needs at least 21 days to recover, and may need as many as 30 days in regions where grass grows more slowly.

Customers will wear out grass tees, says George. The tees need to be deep enough so that the “tee line” can be moved back, giving the grass ample time to heal before moving the line back to the front.

Mathews points out that it’s harder to control customers hitting off turf because the stations aren’t nearly as defined as on artificial turf mats. He suggests using ropes or dividers between each hitting station. Customers will have a tendency to drift forward unless the area is defined, and that’s not only a hazard to the recovering grass but also dangerous for practicing golfers.

Many ranges use tee dividers or simple wooden planks to more clearly define the hitting area, showing where golfers should align themselves.

Tull uses a gallery rope to delineate the backside of his grass teeing area and bag racks to mark each station.

“We try to wait to reseed until it’s a 15- to 20-foot-wide area,” says Tull. “The entire driving range is irrigated so water is no problem.”

If the bluegrass and rye blend Smiley’s offers gets too much traffic and begins to show some wear and tear, Tull simply shuts down that side of the facility for a while. He has, on rare occasions, shut down both sides to keep the grass healthy.

Another way ranges deal with overuse issues is to shut down the grass tees or at least a portion of them at night. George says many ranges find that more recreational golfers come out at night, while the more serious players want to practice during the day—when they’d normally be playing golf.

Closing the grass tees at night can solve another common problem, too—lighting. On many ranges, particularly where grass tees have been added, the front rotation of the grass hitting area is so far forward that it’s in the shadows.

“Light dissipates very quickly as it travels over space,” says Mathews. “You get shadows and things like that out there and the only thing you can do is add more lighting, and [owners] don’t like to do that because it’s more money.”

Sod or Seed
When Chris Leatherman took over management of Leatherman Golf Learning Center in Charlotte, N.C., two years ago, he sunk nearly $20,000 into reconstructing the grass tees. The 43,000-square-foot area had a mobile 25-foot-high retractable netting system to safeguard the seven grass tees from shots made by golfers hitting off the mats. Leatherman traded in the smaller tees for three larger, well-placed Bermuda grass tees that are more functional. The new safer design eliminated the netting, making the grass tees more visually pleasing and a better fit with the existing 50-station artificial turf tee line.

Leatherman reopened the facility in July 2002 just four months after its former owners had closed shop. The grass tee renovation started just one month shy of opening day. With no time for a grow-in period, sod was the logical choice, but perhaps not the easiest labor-wise.

“We thought we could [lay sod] with four or five of us, and we quickly learned that wasn’t going to work,” he recalls. “We were lucky to find a landscaper who was able to get us 10 temporary workers and then we had 15 of us out there laying sod. We got the whole thing done in two weeks but it wasn’t easy.”

The facility opened on time, though the sod hadn’t completely taken hold. A drought plaguing the Carolinas didn’t help either, and Leatherman shakes his head when he thinks about the water bill that came the following month.

Most ranges adding grass tees choose sod over seed because they can get the tees up and running much quicker and there’s little margin for error. “If you seed and you have any kind of rain or wind erosion or heavy traffic, you can start getting ruts, soft spots or compacted areas that turn into bird baths,” explains George.

Design Options
There are two basic grass tee designs: flat and tiered. For flat tees, George recommends building a 1 or 2 percent slope into the teeing area with a drain tile—a pipe used to conduct drainage water from the soil—underneath. The area should then be capped with 8 inches of fast-draining sand so that when the sand is leveled flat and the sod is rolled on top (or seed is spread), it creates an “instant erosion barrier.”

Before installing irrigation pipes, Mathews recommends grading the topsoil (and any fill) to expose rocks and roots, which can then be removed before the pipes are laid.
Bringing in professionals to help with this process—or even earlier in the project—is an expense that will save money in the long run, experts say. “The do-it-yourself [owners] always seem to have a problem, often because they’re limited by their available equipment and in some cases, their expertise,” says George. “Settling of the soil is a very common problem because they don’t have a heavy enough piece of equipment to compact it properly. We look for an 85 percent compaction rate or higher, and if you don’t get that, your tee will have a giant low spot in it.”

Tiered tees, the second design option, offer better visibility, but constructing them entails a more complicated grading process and a bigger budget, particularly if there’s not enough available fill dirt on site. Topography is usually the deciding factor in going flat or tiered, depending on the natural slope of the site.

According to Mathews, a stairway tier design has a tee depth of 80 to 120 feet and is divided into separate tiers of 20 to 40 feet, with each tier spaced 3 feet lower than the tier behind it.

Because of the hilly terrain on the left side of Smiley’s tee line, all the grass tees had to be elevated 14 feet to complete the flat line, which slowed construction and increased costs. “I didn’t want uphill, downhill,” says Tull. “I wanted a nice flat surface to hit from. We moved a lot of dirt and brought in a lot of fill.”

As is often the case, the undulating hillside that was such a problem for the grass tees was a natural fit for a practice bunker, and though the facility took two years to construct and open, Tull is delighted with the finished product. “There isn’t a shot in golf you can’t practice in our grass area,” he says. “The time it took to open was good for the grass. I wanted it to look like it had been here five years before we opened.”

Grass and Mats
Even after the successful renovation of the grass tees at his facility, Leatherman wouldn’t trade in his 50 matted stations. He’s convinced the key to the facility’s overall success is offering both natural and artifical turf, because of inclement weather and because new players are often more comfortable on the artificial turf surface.

“I think you have to have both because there are rainy times and some people just like to hit in the shade,” he says. “Beginners like the mats because it’s always level and it’s good to have them hit there to help protect your grass.”