By Design - Winter 2018

21 Jones, Jr., ASGCA Fellow. In the first semester, we finished the book within about five weeks, so I had to create material for the rest of the semester. “Today, the class consists of nine lectures—over four-to-five weeks— about the anatomy of a golf course and how designers use different elements to create the challenge and strategy—a throwback to the book. After a mid-term exam on that material, I get into the process of golf course design and how a designer takes a project from the ground up through construction. “My lectures include the history of golf course architecture, the classic holes of golf—based on the book by Graves and Cornish, site evaluation, how to read topographic maps and golf course routing—things that designers take into consideration when laying out a golf course. “Following those lectures, I give the students five weeks to design their own golf course routing plan based on two pages of written requirements. Each week they have to meet various completion goals and I review everyone’s progress one-to-one during the class. “The students really enjoy the hands-on experience of laying out a golf course and the individual hole designs—I get some really wild stuff from time to time.” In some cases, ASGCA members’ role in education helps their business too. Kay says: “In the last thirty days I’ve had two ex-students from quite a long time ago contact me. They now oversee municipal golf courses. In the north-east of America we are having record- breaking levels of rainfall—the wet conditions mean that the greens have suffered, so they are trying to convince their management to spend money to redesign and rebuild a couple of greens. “The program has evolved a lot since I first started teaching it. Ninety percent of students were from New Jersey, New York or Pennsylvania. In the mid-2000s, a magazine rated Rutgers among the best turfgrass programs in the United States. Now just a third to 50 percent of students are from the north-east area, the rest are coming from all over the country.” • Without people helping me I certainly wouldn’t have got to the point where I am now Jason Straka, ASGCA Stephen Kay, ASGCA (above, second left) with students from the Rutgers Professional Golf Turf Management School. Chris Wilczynski, ASGCA (left) teaches at Michigan State University Photo: courtesy of Stephen Kay