Outside the city limits, Florida reveals itself pretty quickly: it’s a thick, tangled wilderness, tamed in places by man but constantly trying to reclaim every inch that’s been developed. There are few better examples than Streamsong Resort in ultra-rural central Florida, an hour southeast of Tampa. Streamsong is home to three world-class golf courses, the first two of which — Red and Blue — opened in 2013; the third course, Black, debuted in 2017. Since their introductions less than a decade ago, the task of nurturing Red and Blue — and beating back the wastes without — has fallen principally to Kyle Harris, the two courses’ superintendent. Part of that battle is acknowledging the realities of Florida’s climate, which puts miles on a golf course faster than in most other parts of the world. So when COVID landed in early 2020, Streamsong moved up plans to re-grass Red and Blue’s greens with Mach One, a newly developed Bermudagrass; the courses reopened in October, leaving Harris the challenge of resuming daily-play maintenance while getting to know the ins and outs of his new putting surfaces.
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LYING FOUR: As someone who doesn’t understand agronomy at all, tell me why the decision was made to re-grass the greens. Streamsong Red and Blue are less than 10 years old, and that seems like a pretty short time for something like this. Or maybe it’s not?
KYLE HARRIS: It’s not. The best way I can describe it is that there’s a functional difference between a cool-season grass like a bentgrass or poa or fescue, and a warm-season grass like a Bermudagrass or a zoysia. And there are no good ultradwarf seeded varieties of Bermudagrass that you’d want on your putting green. So on a cool-season grass, you can introduce genetic diversity through seed every year, just by overseeding into an aerification hole — that’s a common practice — whereas down here, you just don’t have that option. If you think of it in terms of generations, what your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandkids look like: they’ll probably share some features with you, but because they’re several generations down the road, they’re going to be different people genetically.
LYING FOUR: Makes sense.
KYLE HARRIS: And so it goes with warm-season turf. All warm-season greens are on some sort of genetic clock like that. And when you get south of I-10 in Florida, where you don’t really go dormant, you accelerate that process. Where in Oxford, Mississippi, it might be a 20-year process, down here it could be an eight-year process. That’s the most general way you could put it. And also, there’s just not as many varieties for fine turf in the Bermudagrasses, because they all either come from Bermuda or zoysia. So your MiniVerdes or your Champions or your Mach Ones or your TifEagles — there’s four varieties; where I know bentgrass putting surfaces that have four varieties on just that surface.
LYING FOUR: Oh, wow.
KYLE HARRIS: Yeah. So it’s a question of trying to manage a monostand and just not having as many options as you would on a cool-season turf. So it’s not that uncommon. The timeframe is gonna be — I mean, I know some courses that have gone five years. And obviously there are some courses that have 20- or 25-year-old strands of turf. And then I guess the third factor in there is innovation. Especially with the warm-season varieties, where you’re maybe 20 or 30 years behind the fine-leaf texture that you’d have up North, just because of where all the research was. I’d say it’s only been in the past 20 or 25 years when you’ve gotten different varieties of warm-season grasses that compare to that bentgrass or poa up north.
LYING FOUR: What does the actual process of re-grassing a green look like? How does that work?
KYLE HARRIS: Well, there’s two. There’s what’s called a no-till, and then there’s what we did, which is a little bit more invasive. Basically, they both start by killing what you already have; so if you were down at Streamsong in February, you were putting on some yellow grass that was pretty quick, because it wasn’t growing at that point. So you kill off what you’re replacing, and then in the no-till, you would basically cut the sprig into what you killed off — which has some efficiency benefits, and then some other management issues that you’ll have to deal with down the road. But because we had time and support of our stakeholders, we went with the second option — which is to strip the green, remove all the old turf, kind of amend the soil a bit to your liking and maybe add a little bit more sand to replace what you’ve stripped off, refinish the green, and plant the sprig later. Those are your two options. Both do well at preserving the contours; you’re not tearing up too much at this point, because that soil has matured over the years. So nothing’s really changed, in terms of the design.
LYING FOUR: And in between sprigging and reopening for play, is there anything to do other than water the grass and make sure it doesn’t die?
KYLE HARRIS: You’re growing it in, obviously. You want to get full coverage first. That’s sort of your first benchmark. When the green is 100-percent covered with turf, you can start asking, “OK, how do we manage this for golf? What do our topdressing rates look like? What do our cultivation things, like verticutting, look like? How high do we have to mow it? What’s the mowing frequency? Does this height of cut versus that height of cut produce a better ball roll?” And believe it or not, you’re actually using the stimpmeter for its intended purpose during this process. Hopefully, you’re into that by about Week 8 or Week 9, and we were pretty well on that schedule. By mid-July, we were trying to figure out what we needed to do to the turf to bring it to our standards of play. From there, ideally you have a little bit of time where you’re just waiting to open and fixing any lingering trouble areas.
LYING FOUR: So what’s the deal with this grass, Mach One?
KYLE HARRIS: Well, it was developed by Rodney Lingle, the longtime superintendent at Memphis Country Club. Like most of these varieties, some observant person saw a biotype that they liked, and they isolated that and tried to grow it. And when they grew it, they tried to propagate it; when they propagated it, they started to maintain it like a green. That’s how most of these varieties came about. In a lot of cases, you’ll have a university involved, doing test plots and all that. We now have 100 years of selective pressure as an evolutionary mechanism on golf turf, so you can go in there and start isolating the different responses to playing golf on it.
LYING FOUR: And what’s the difference between that and what your average Streamsong visitor is used to playing on the weekends?
KYLE HARRIS: I think unanimously, every one of our caddies would tell you that there’s almost no grain. It’s a very tight, almost upright grower, so it doesn’t have as much grain. I know of bentgrass varieties that have more grain on them. And every turf is going to have grain, so it’s not absent — but even compared to MiniVerde, which doesn’t have much grain, this has far less grain. That’ll probably be the most obvious. From an agronomic end, it seems very well rooted and drought-tolerant. On that end, it seems to play well with our conditions — because on a sandy soil, drought tolerance is very important. And most Bermudagrasses aren’t terribly drought-tolerant.
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LYING FOUR: So what’s your story? How’d you wind up at Streamsong?
KYLE HARRIS: I picked up golf in high school on a lark, because I thought the concept of a high school golf team was the most ludicrous thing I’d ever heard of. I tried out for the team; I think I behaved myself and just made the practice squad. I discovered golf well before women, so I spent my days playing golf and got moderately competent at it. I caddied at a club in the Philly area for two years in high school and went to the PGM at Penn State. Just being a golf pro doesn’t fit my personality; I’m not a terribly social “people person,” and that is definitely a people business — but I got a chance to work for Scott Anderson at Huntingdon Valley on the weekends, just changing cups and doing light maintenance. He decided to take a shot on me full-time the next summer, and I haven’t looked back. I’d moved down here for two winters for the year-round season just to get more experience, and then moved back and finished the turf certificate at Rutgers while living at home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for two years. And during that timeframe, I reached out to Tom Doak about this job, and said I’d be interested in working for him as an intern. He got back to me and said, “The timeframe for this — it’s gonna be a while, but you still have another 10 weeks of school. It may work out; let me get back to you.” I don’t hear from him for a year, and then he reaches out. And it was right at a time when I had just started an assistant superintendent’s job — coincidentally, at the course I caddied at in high school. And when Tom Doak comes knocking — I mean, my boss even said at the time, “You’ve gotta take that. It’s a great opportunity.” Then I met my boss, Rusty Mercer; we got along from the get-go, and I really haven’t looked back. I like to tell people that if you tell the right person you’re willing to do anything to work for them, it’s generally gonna work out.
LYING FOUR: Was there an adjustment period, going from working on bentgrass to Bermuda?
KYLE HARRIS: I mean, basic agronomy is basic agronomy. It’s sunlight, water, and nitrogen. There is a metabolic difference that makes a cool-season grass a cool-season grass, and a warm-season grass a warm-season grass: cool-season grasses are just less tolerant of heat. So your management of a cool-season grass in the summer is basically managing the canopy temperature so the plant can metabolize in its most efficient capacity — which is why guys are running syringe cycles at 2 p.m. on bentgrass in the middle of August. Cultivation is a bit different, because Bermudagrass is a little more aggressive — managing the grain, and that sort of thing. But other than that, the basic agronomy is the same: the plant needs adequate water, it needs a good root structure, it needs to be fed, and it needs sunlight. It goes from this very macro discussion to a very site-specific, micro discussion. And that’s the difference. You’re liable to find more differences at the golf course down the road as you are between a warm-season grass and a cool-season grass. It’s not as a stark as you’d imagine.
LYING FOUR: Speaking of your specific site, what’s an average day like for you?
KYLE HARRIS: Lately, pretty fun. I gotta admit — grow-ins are fun. You’re just waiting to open. And you’re really just trying to find stuff to do until you open the golf course; September was getting that way, especially with the current world situation. Now, we start 5:15-ish; get the staff out for our morning golf course prep, which is mowing greens and rolling greens, mowing fairways if we’re mowing fairways that day, raking bunkers if we’re raking bunkers that day, all of those little things. I’ve been getting my hand into course setup again — so I’ll go out, change a few cups, keep an eye on things, and start working through our project list. And at Streamsong, that project list is constant. It’s a very chaotic site, because you’re in a very fertile place in Florida. We have the type of golf course that, in some of the areas between holes, you’re letting it go to nature. So you’re kind of constantly evolving, constantly tweaking the site to that evolution. The golf course you see today is different than the golf course you would’ve seen three years ago, and the golf course you see three years from now will be different than the golf course you see today. And the daily routine is subject to that macro sense again: where are you in that process, and what are you doing? So it changes from day to day.
LYING FOUR: I hadn’t thought about that, but Streamsong is such a remote location — surrounded by wilderness. So I’d imagine that you’re constantly fighting back against that wilderness.
KYLE HARRIS: That’s a really good way of putting it. We were fortunate that we had three architecture firms that understood that. I think it was Bill Coore that put the philosophy best: “You want to maintain this golf course so that it browns in, rather than greens out.” Irrigation, for example, is designed to just get to the edge of the fairway — as opposed to having irrigation going well into that native area, just for the sake of maintaining every acre as fine green turf. You’re constantly working that edge where golf ends and where the site begins, in its aboriginal sense. And yeah, it’s an ebb and a flow. Even seasonally, we have different aesthetics and ways we maintain it: by August, you’re almost inundated by it, but two weeks later when the day length gets to that point when you get that first full point, everything just kind of relaxes and you ease into it and kind of take it into its winter look, when you can start to fight back. And every year, that evolution changes slightly — so what you did last year isn’t necessarily what you’ll do this year. It’s interesting, especially in this Internet age and smartphone age; imagine if Donald Ross had these photographic records that I have, just based on smartphones and Instagram and the Internet. I can reference Instagram photos from four years ago and go, “Oh yeah, that did kinda look that way, and we kinda lost that. We need to bring that back.” It’s a micro-restoration, in a sense. Or, “Oh wow, I can’t believe it looked that way — what were we thinking?” I’ve had both reactions.
LYING FOUR: I’d never thought of that. That’s gotta be invaluable.
KYLE HARRIS: Imagine if golf courses had that 90 years ago. Where would we be? And where are we going to be in 90 years with a lot of these places? We are so well cataloged that it’s almost going to be a struggle to keep a steady keel, just because everyone’s going to have a reference. That’s what gets me up every morning, frankly: to be able to be a steady hand, or a guiding hand if we need to change. I mean, we’ve got some bushes that are easily 10 times the size that they were during grow-in; what do you do about that? Eighty years ago, the answer probably would have been to do nothing until you got so over-treed that you needed to cut down a thousand trees. Now it’s a little bit more of a constant process.
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Photos: credit Streamsong Resort
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