The Lowdown on Waverley Country Club with Superintendent Brian Koffler

00:00:00
Speaker 1: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.

00:00:05
Speaker 2: And when I find my ball in a bride egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida egg, fridagg Frida egg, Frida egg, bride egg.

00:00:11
Speaker 1: Lie, I'm about ready to run off the golf course.

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Speaker 2: Welcome to the Friday Egg Golf Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison, and today we're talking about Waverley Country Club in Portland, Oregon, with Waverley's superintendent, Brian Koffler. Waverley is, in my opinion, the best course in Portland, and this week it's hosting the US Senior Women's Open. You can catch coverage of the tournament on Saturday and Sunday on Peacock and Golf Channel. I would say set your DVRs. This is a special event, the US Senior Women's Open, and it's a rare opportunity to see Waverley on broadcast TV. The last time you could have seen it, I believe, was in the year two thousand at the US Women's Amateur. Tiger Woods also won one of his US Junior Amateurs here in nineteen ninety three. But I don't believe that was on TV. Waverley is best understood as a Chandler Egan design and it was restored by Gil Hants in twenty twelve. It's just a beautiful, elegant course right on the banks of the Willamette River, so make sure to check it out this weekend. Brian Koffler is, as I said, the superintendent at Waverley, and he's a really smart, personable guy with an extremely impressive resume, which we'll dig into a bit in this episode. All right, so after this break you'll hear from Brian Koffler at Waverley Country Club. This episode of the Friday Golf Podcast is brought to you by for more than a century, with cutting edge turf equipment and irrigation solutions, Toro has had your front nine covered and your back nine to two. In fact, Toro's always had your back period. Toro is as committed to your long term success as tour pros are committed to their shot. That's down to top notch customer support from Toro and it's dedicated local distributors, both of whom are passionate about delivering turf equipment and irrigation solutions that solve real world problems, follow at Toro Golf on Twitter and reach out to your local Toro distributor. Today, Ryan Coffler, welcome to the podcast.

00:02:41
Speaker 1: How you doing Hi, I am, I'm doing great. We're in the midst of advance week for the Senior Ones Open, so I've been here a few hours this week, but all in due course.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, to give people an idea, we're recording this on the Thursday before the US Senior Women's Open and at Waverley Country Club. This podcast will come out Monday or Tuesday of next week. So Waverley Country Club. I think a lot of people out there probably don't know much about this course. It's been a while since it hosted a televised championship really, so maybe you could just start by describing the piece of land that this course sits on, because that's like a big big deal here, Like, what is an incredible piece of land?

00:03:27
Speaker 1: Yeah? Absolutely, I think that's one of the things when we're innovated the golf course that really opened to people's eyes was just the variability of the topography, the landforms. It's obviously on the east bank of the Willamotte River. You kind of have this one piece of the golf course that stretches out jets out east which has just a four back to back to back holes that kind of just run back and forth east west and then you kind of work your way back to the clubhouse and then the back nine is on the river side of the Yeah, it's a it's an unusual piece of land within Portland and that it does have some physical topography to it and being right along the banks of the river, it's just an unbelievable setting. And as I mentioned, when we were able to take out I think it was three hundred and seventy five trees it it gave you views of the of the river from other parts of the golf course that you couldn't see before. And that was one of Gill's major pitches on the whole process was you can go anywhere in the Pacific Northwest and play a tree line golf course. You can do it all over the place, but really there aren't that many golf courses along the banks of the Malamat that that really showcased the property as they do.

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Speaker 2: It's incredible. I had the drone up a couple of mornings ago and as soon as I put it up. I was looking at the golf course and I turned the drone around and suddenly there's the bridges and the city of Portland right there in the distance, right down the river. Yeah, so you're the location really couldn't be much better for the Portland area. A piece of land like this wouldn't be available to a modern golf course.

00:05:03
Speaker 1: No, and I think, you know, and they moved out here and the club was found in eighteen ninety six. They moved out here in eighteen ninety eight, but they owned a bigger piece of property that involved this neighborhood kind of to the northeast of us, and so you know, through selling that piece of property to generate some funds to do some other stuff, they ended up with this property probably in nineteen ten. It has been kind of the format in which it is, so yeah, it's it would be impossible to do this. And you think about back in the day when it was truly a country club. There was a rail line that came out from the city and so people there's some people that had second homes up in this neighborhood up above the clubhouse that it was truly a country club. It was out maybe five miles as a crow flies from downtown. But you know, before they had been automobiles and stuff. You didn't just jump on out here, which is kind of comical because one of the challenges now for us is that as people spread out over the city and into different neighborhoods in traffic just as notoriously gotten worse and worse over the years, as people moved into Portland, it changed our usage a lot. You know, members you almost had to make an effort to come out here, and people, you know, when their bridges under construction or whatever the case was. So it's been interesting as far as member usage of the club.

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Speaker 2: Well, could you give me the basics of the architectural history here once the club moved to this piece of land, which it wasn't always on from the beginning, correct, You know this club dates way back to the late nineteenth century. But when it moved to this piece of land, what basically happened to it? Which architects were involved that kind of stuff.

00:06:40
Speaker 1: So Jack Moffat would have been that, I'll say, the first guy that would have i'll say, had a name. He was the golf ro here. He I think threw together a layout in the early nineteen hundreds. I don't think he was involved in eighteen ninety eight. I'm not sure they had some sort of rudimentary layout, So Jack Moffat would have been the first one. It's not like he's designed anything else. He was just the calf bro here at the time, which happened a lot back in the day. Common Yeah. Absolutely, yeah. One of the interesting things that we found out through this most recent history book. We just had a one hundred and twenty fifth anniversary book put together, which was a great fact finding mission. They hired John to Saint Joor, who obviously has written a ton of great books over the years on the history of golf clubs. And you know through it's so easy now to research old overgoing in articles, all of these things. You can just look them up on the computer and then find the articles. So we're able to I'll say, I'll go back in two thousand and eleven twelve, when we were going to renovate the golf course. We always thought h. Chandeler Egan got involved from the get go, that's who designed it. In nineteen twelve. Well, then you start doing a little bit of homework on well he really he bought this orchard down in Medford in nineteen eleven. You're like, well, he's not going to be driving a car up here, so he had to take the train and he really just moved to the area. So by how how would he have by May of nineteen twelve finished design and opened it up. So long story short, we went back and found a few two or three mentions of H. H. Barker being in the Northwest and coming to Waverley Country Club, so we're fairly certain he laid out some of the elements of the golf course in I'll say the nineteen probably I think he was an nine.

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Speaker 2: This is Herbert Barker, Yes's first name, right.

00:08:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think he was the I want to say, the golf pro at Atlantic City or Arcola at the time.

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Speaker 2: I know not somebody I had heard of before Channel League and is very well known to anybody who studies golf on the West Coast. He was in charge of the nineteen twenty eight twenty nine Pebble Beach renovation. Yet they did that's so eye catching. He designed the first nine at Pacific Grove Golf Links, as well as a number of courses in the Pacific Northwest, but Herbert Barker comes as a bit of a surprise. They're like, Okay, there.

00:08:54
Speaker 1: He is, Yeah, exactly. I mean it was one of those you kind of wonder what he was doing in town, you know, would we have really solicited him to come out. Usually if if stuff like that happens, it goes back to like the nineteen oh five exposition where Olmsted Brothers came out. Well, they did a series of parks in Portland, Seattle spoke in, so they kind of took advantage of being on the west coast where H. H. Barker. I don't really know much else that he did. He probably visited a couple other golf clubs and consulted, but I really don't know the history behind why he was even out here. The layout that he put together, there was a green, I think it was the third green is roughly where eighteen is, but then the fourth tie is kind of where the clubhouse is, and it went out into the area that was the driving range before it was turned into a polo field. So we're fairly confident in nineteen oh nine to nineteen eleven that was kind of the layout he put together. I think they used a lot of those holes for the nineteen twelve layout because the clubhouse was built in nineteen thirteen, so they've kind of had the twelve layout. Is the configuration that you see now or that we play now. So Egan came in probably in like thirteen fourteen, started as a consulting architect. There's a lot of stuff through the teens that, you know, we have Oregonian articles and pictures and stuff, not of him necessarily, but mentions of him doing that work. He was a consulting architect. I'm gonna guess through I think he passed away in the thirties, late thirties, I think, and then you kind of go through every known name in the Pacific Northwest. You know, McCann was a consulting architect here, I want to say in the fifties. I believe he was the one that turned seventeen, which is a massive two tiered green. It's ninety five hundred square feet or something. But before he was the architect that was, you know, the bottom half of the green was the only part, and then he added the top half. And then you get into the sixties through the nineties and it's Robert Muir Graves John Harbottle. John Harbottle was the last one prior to Gill. Yeah, there's there's all sorts of Bob Robinson, which is not ted, but the other one who's done some work, good work in the Pacific Northwest. He did all the mounding, the old mounting that we took out, but mounting man greens, and he redid the putting green. So it's it had been kind of an architectural mismash over the years, kind of all the way through Harbottle. And I don't necessarily think, to be fair to John, I don't think they necessarily asked him to go and renovate the whole thing and do a complete overhaul of it. I think it was more, hey, we want to take a look at this hole. We don't like this about it. Can you solve that problem? And so by the time I got here in twenty ten and they kind of said, hey, let's they were coincidentally just reserving money for an irrigation system. They said, well, if we're going to do that, should we talk to somebody about doing some work to the golf course. And that was kind of the impetus for that process to start.

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Speaker 2: Nice So we're going to get to that restoration in ad minute because you were here during it. Gil Hans performed the work and it turned the course into what it is now, a really terrific course and a good reflection of I would say probably the Egan design at this course. But first, I mean just to give people an idea of what the course is like and what they should be looking for. What are some of the holes that you think that they'll actually you know, film that will stand out to people.

00:12:24
Speaker 1: So there's I believe the live coverage is going to be three hours each day, and so they'll pick up my understandings. They'll pick up the coverage on like six or seven. Six is a downhill par three surrounded by bunkers, you know, seventy nine, they're all quality golf holes. Seven is kind of a weird green, so depending on it's probably six foot of rise from back to front or front to back. I should say it's huge too. It's a big green. It's seventy eight hundred square feet, and so depending on the whole location, it can dramatically change how they play that hole and the distance to it. Obviously, eight and nine, you know, E's longest hole on the golf course. Long par five kind of gets you back towards the clubhouse. Nine is a super short par three with a big, deep fronting bunker, and then you kind of get to the I consider a tough stretch of golf holes ten, eleven, twelve, tens A. I think they're playing it at three seventy five, but it's back into the prevailing wind. Eleven is the smallest green on the golf course. It's a kind of a little bit of an elevated green, but I think they're playing at one hundred and forty some yards and it's it's a small green, it's got a huge false front. It's just it's tough to and these guys are awesome, obviously they'll probably handle it very easily. But if you're longer the pen on eleven, you're probably gonna be off the front of the green playing three. And so yeah, that's usually the I think most people. If you're gonna miss it, miss it short, because if you miss it long, you're gonna be short after the second one. So twelve is another longish par four into the prevailing wind uphill, and then you kind of get into some a little bit of scoring opportunities. Thirteen is a massively downhill par five. It's four to ninety I think for the Championship. Fourteen to fifteen neat golf holes, but nothing special. And then kind of the three finishing holes. Sixteen's a big downhill punch bowl concept hole where you're playing dead at the river. And then seventeen eighteen, And we talked about this the other day that they're both back to back par five finishing holes. They're both playing in the same direction, so you got both downwind. But they are very different golf holes. So when you stand on the tee on seventeen, you have to think about where you're going to place your drive. There there's bunkers that kind of hamming it on the left, and there's a center line bunker kind of shading the right half of the fairway. And then you've got the hazard the Willlamotte River to the right, and eighteen is you can step in a whale on it. I mean, your only threat is if you miss it right. The landform kind of feeds down into the river and that grounds pretty dry usually and so but they're just great finishing holes. You know the distance that they're going to play eighteen at the main t is four ninety nine. I don't know how many of these gals we'll try to get there in two, but you know, par five's always are somewhat dramatic towards towards the finishing holes, and great opportunity for something to happen.

00:15:14
Speaker 2: What I like about seventeen and eighteen is that both are get a ball I guess, you know, reachable I don't know, depends on the player. But in order to put yourself in a position to reach those greens in two, you have to take on a little bit of risk on the drives, you know, because eighteen kind of has this higher left side of the fairway and a lower right side of the fairway. If you manage to get your drive to the lower right side, which is of course closer to the river, then you have a better opportunity to go for the green in two. On seventeen. The right side of the fairway is pretty heavily guarded by that center line bunker that you mentioned, as well as obviously the Willlammett River to the right, and so it's a lot safer to go out to the left. But out to the left is a little bit of a worse opportunity to go for the green in two, and so if you really want to attack those holes, you have to take on some risk on the t shot. And it's so they're both pretty neat in that way.

00:16:10
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, it'll be interesting to see. And I I've watched each of these championships or this event in the last couple of years. I didn't watch all the coverage, but one of the interesting things is it's the field. It's one hundred and twenty two players, I believe, and the field one hundred and twenty Sorry, it's there's kind of a big discrepancy in driving distance, which presents a unique challenge of setting up the golf course. And so I think you've got, like I said, just a huge direpanency. And so it'll be interesting to see how many of them can get there in two on some of these par fives. So looking forward to it.

00:16:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, that will be cool that the differences between the players. Because I had the opportunity to play with Jill McGill at the media day, which was incredible. She's she's the defending champion. That was a real privilege. She smashes the ball really like Yeah, rocks it. She's very athletic, plays tennis competitively, and yeah, she smashes the ball, and so I would imagine that, you know, she may be at sort of the higher end of driving distance, and then you'll have some players who are who are kind of bunting it out there a little bit more, but obviously scoring in different ways. And I think this is a course that's pretty you know, well set up to deal with differences in driving distances. There's a lot of holes where you don't necessarily really want to want to vombit. I'm kind of going through them in my mind.

00:17:34
Speaker 1: It's like seven is probably the best example where they're going to play from about three seventy and some of the longer hitters, there's the the fair was canted pretty heavily right to left and it feeds into that big d punker on the left side. Well, if you're a shorter hitter, you probably aren't going to get into that much trouble there. But if you're a longer hitter, your ball's either going to cure them kind of over to that left side, or if you can clear it to the top of the ridge, there's a bunker up the right side. That you could probably get into. So to your point, if you're a longer hitter, there's probably there are certain places where you're going to get into trouble where the shorter hitters won't. And so it has its advantages obviously, whether you'd want in a bunker or you're hitting a four iron.

00:18:12
Speaker 2: In When you have a unique field like this, how does it inform your presentation of the course. Do you do anything different here than you would for say a US amateur if it came here.

00:18:25
Speaker 1: It was interesting. We had a Green Committey meeting last week and we just kind of went, you know, it was just a debrief of what to expect and all that find stuff, and it dawned on me before the meeting. You just process things in different ways, I said. I told the committee, this is a very rare championship where they're really going to play it as the members do. Green Speeds are not going to be anything over the top the obviously this level of championship. They weren't going to ask us to build a new set of tees way back. They didn't move any bunkers anything like that. There were a very few I'm trying to think of any mowing line changes, there were an any fairway mowing line changes or runouts around greens. There's some hidha cut stuff on the edges of greens and fairways that we're going to change. But for the most part, they're going to see it and they're going to play it as it's presented to the membership, which is unique. You don't see that at championships very often, especially the open ones. This is so I feel like that that was just kind of unique perspective for our members to play it that way and see how they're going to play it.

00:19:25
Speaker 2: So there are some greens out here with a significant amount of tilt. I bet that'll be a talking point about the course that you have fast grains and you have some grains that are really on an angle and that really kind of flow with the land. Yeah, and in a lot of places the land is pretty tilted here. So I'm thinking like three six seven, ten, eleven.

00:19:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, three six, seven and eleven are always those are most talked about there is It's interesting those are always the one when we talk about green speeds, and this is always a controversial topic that one of the challenges is if we were to go much faster than we do, and we our greens aren't screaming by any stretch imagination. There are clubs around town that probably have day to day faster and ours, but if we want to take them to twelve twelve and a half, you just start losing legitimate hole locations and you start funneling and concentrating traffic into places where it agonomically doesn't do you any good. And so it'll be interesting to see. Historically that is the defense of this golf course. It's not a long golf course. We couldn't I think tipped out might be able to get to sixty seven hundred barely to sixty seven hundred they're going to play it, I think roughly around six to sixty one hundred. But the defense of the golf course has always been the putting surfaces. They're very unique, very challenging, and to your point, those four we'll probably be talked about for anybody that hasn't played here for sure.

00:20:54
Speaker 2: Well, you know, when you have putting surfaces that are that tilted and then others that are more on a flat grade, you know, most of the greens out here have some internal contour and some interest in them, but there are greens that are sitting on more flat pieces of land. As a superintendent, like, how do you figure out green speed when you have that kind of variety.

00:21:15
Speaker 1: I mean, we have these conversations at the green committee level that we have a charter that dictates, hey, we want green seeds to be X, and we have those conversations of hey, if you want to go much, there are greens that we could go way faster and they wouldn't be problematic. Number twelve is a good example. It's a large green that there's plenty of coupable space. It wouldn't be difficult to get that thing faster, but there was My first year was probably one of the least intelligent things I've ever done. But my first year really struggling with whole locations on number eleven. And this was before the renovation, and so there were the false front just came further into the green, so there are fewer coupleable spaces, and I thought, well, to create more, to create more whole locations, we'll just roll that or not mow that. Certain days, like we process everything else, and the Wavelly members are uber kind, like they're they're not the type to complain about anything or Jackie up about stuff, and the guy kind of gave me an airfold that you know that green is dramatically slower and you need to, like, if you're gonna do that, you need to like post a sign saying this Green's gonna be slower and that that was really stupid. I don't know why I did that, And so typically, you know, it's not in your best interest, in anybody's best interest to have putting services that are rolling different speeds. I mean, true reason the Stepmerors created was to equalize it between greens. So yeah, I think we have the conversation at the Green committee level of what do we feel as appropriate. And you know, obviously the off season is very different than the core of the golf season. But once you kind of set settle on something and agree to it, that's our job to try to keep it there.

00:22:49
Speaker 2: We've had some pretty wild fluctuations in weather here in the Pacific Northwest lately. Yeah, just this week, temperature has got up into the hundreds yep, which is historically unusual. So we've got some planetary conditions that are affecting things. But even in good times, you get a lot of variety of weather in the Pacific Northwest. So what are some of the challenges and some of the solutions with regard to growing grass here.

00:23:16
Speaker 1: So, yeah, the big challenge and the last two years are a great example of this. That last year it was one of the wettest springs we'd had, and I swear it rained until June fifteenth or twentieth pretty consistently, so we weren't having any issues, weren't turning irrigation on anything like that. But it immediately went from rain to I think by the end of the one week it was ninety five and the wind's just howling and you're, you know, terf story is starting to peel back. So when you have those issues, if there's no moderation in that spring dry down, well your roots really don't. Your plant doesn't have to go and get roots because it hasn't been stressed at all, and so you have an artificially shallow root system, which polla doesn't needy help with that respect, it's already shall enough. And so last year that time when the moisture tap shut off was i'll say mid to late June. Well this year it happened about the tenth or fifteenth of May. This year, and so we really we had I think it was on May eighth or tenth, we had an inch and a quarter of rain in about forty five minutes, which is really rare for us. We don't get storms like that very often. I'm sure it probably ran from here over your house in that general direction, and so we don't get storms like that very often. But that was i'll say an inch and a quarter in early May. We've had i think fifteen hundreds of an inch of rain since then, and now we're three months after that, so it's been it has been a challenge. You're relying on your irrigation system, you're relying upon, you know, members understanding, and the club is, if anything, they would rather have me dry it down even further. They're not a green is great club. They really do like it brown around the edges, firm fast, that's great, and they're very understanding of kind of turf loss. Well, when you get to a year like this where you're going to have a televised event and we've just been taking fewer and fewer chances this year. We're not running greens at huge speeds, We're not drying down fairways like we normally would so it's just kind of this has been an anomaly this year as far as presentation goes, where we're as green as we've ever been this time of year. Usually we're kind of which is only going to be ironic because if somebody listens to this and then they seeing even on TV, they're like all the areas between the holes are dead, like they're all just dormant. There's a lot of Dorman grass out there, but this is greener than we normally are in the fairways and kind of immediately off the fairways.

00:25:38
Speaker 2: It is a firm golf course, which is a relative rarity in this area. Most golf courses up here tend to be pretty soggy even through some of the summer months. So we're getting weather conditions now that make it seem like by the time the Championship comes around, things will be running out nicely. Do you have that sense?

00:26:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's been the topic of conversation with both Shannon, who sets up the golf course, and then Corey. Are our agronomous is we want to start the start the week with the tankful like we're and we're there or we're plenty healthy, and then drive the golf course down as we get through it. You know, you know, Shannon had made a comment about we don't want you to make any We don't want to make any decisions that are going to compromise turf health long term. You know, they don't want the impression that you came into town and they leave and you're left with a dead golf course. That's that's not their intention at all. But at the same time, golf courses are firm and faster, they're more exacting from a challenge standpoint. They they are going to require better shot making. There's not a ton of dog legs on this golf course, but you know, the firmer you are, they can run through angles and all that fun stuff. So yeah, I think we're We're set up really really well heading in. I think this is kind of the last really hot day. They're throwing some maybe mid nineties back in on Sunday, but the week of the Championship looks, you know, mid to low eighties, which is great. That kind of sets up nicely for it.

00:27:11
Speaker 2: One thing I'm hoping to see is some players running the ball into the green on sixteen, the par three there is a nice little kicker slope. Yeah, short right of that green, and you know, if it's if it's rolling out, we could see some pretty fun little low shots going in there. I know, there's no guarantees that anybody can make that it's gonna get there, but there are contours like that on this course that really come alive, absolutely firm.

00:27:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's an interesting one you bring up, because we get that a little bit from a few members here and there, that there's a there's an upslope right in front of the green. Just from a drainage standpoint, they had to do. They had to elevate the green a little bit. Well, as you mentioned, there's playing from i'll say the blue te's two hundred and fifteen yards. I think at about one hundred and fifty yards off the tee, there's the starts of the downslope and it's maybe a fifteen twenty yard down slope. Well, ironically, the players that we see have the most success with that hole are the guys that drive the ball one hundred and sixty five yards and they just land it perfectly.

00:28:13
Speaker 2: They get the momentum and that makes sense, and so they use more of the slope.

00:28:18
Speaker 1: Yes, and so there are a lot of better players, and you know, we're never going to be perfectly firm where it's going to hop up and up slope, and you know we could always be firmer. I get that, But that is one of the criticisms is if they hit you know, a good player from two to fifteen, I don't know what they're hitting a five iron and six iron. Well, the ballflight the hole is probably twenty five thirty feet downhill. If you're hitting off of an elevated TA position and you're hitting the ball high and it checks into that slope, it does create some criticism. I'll put it that way. But then the other challenge is that if you get it to the front edge and you get a big hop off the green, it goes through the green and there's no real middle ground there. But yeah, that it is funny. We see we'll call them life experienced members that don't drive the balls far anymore, and you know they have great success with that. Go hoole. Just using the intended concept of the whole.

00:29:14
Speaker 2: Some of the younger people need to learn how to how to do a bunt driver.

00:29:17
Speaker 1: You know that I tried the last time I played. I tried, I was trying to do it with a hybrid and it failed miserably. And you know, I'm a fourteen handicap, so it's not and not a maintained handicap. That's probably from the last like five years of scores. It still was fourteen. So yeah, yeah, it didn't go as planned.

00:29:36
Speaker 2: The shot wasn't in your arsenal, not really in mind either. This episode of the Friday Golf Podcast is brought to you by Toro. Americans like our utility vehicles the way we like our US Open courses. Rugged. A winner needs to do it all in tough conditions, and Toro's new Workman UTX line is here to get the job done. Any job, snow and ice removal, tree maintenance, transporting equipment or materials, whatever you need, this commercial grade, smooth riding, four wheel drive monster has your back. The Workman utx's proprietary governing system unpairs ground speed and RPM, so the owner can limit the machine speed without gutting the power. Higher RPMs when more oomph is required, less RPMs, and less fuel consumption when it isn't. That kind of all around performance is what champions are made of. Follow at Toro golf on Twitter and reach out to your local Toro distributor to schedule a demo. So let's talk a little bit about your career. You have a very simple and very impressive resume. You were the assistant superintendent Olympic Club for a couple of years, than the superintendent there until twenty ten when you move to Waverley. Before you were at the Olympic Club, you also had some pretty incredible experiences. So were what were some of those?

00:31:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I went to school at Oregon State and I was originally a pharmacy major. So for the first two years I thought I was gonna be a pharmacist and realized I'm not that great of a student and they had changed the coursework so it was going to take too long. So I told my parents one summer, said I'm gonna change my major. So I went back. They tried to talk me out of it, but I went back to school fall of my junior year. And when you change your major after your sophomore year, you run risk of probably not getting out of there on time. And when I was going to be able to graduate in four years and a quarter, but at that point I would have had two three month jobs under my belt. I feel I'm not real marketable at that point. So went to the main advisor, Tom Cook, who ran the turf program, and said, hey, you know, what do you think about maybe taking a year off and going down to California or something and working a couple places. So he gave me two guys numbers, Tim Putnam, who was at Ironwood at the time now is at Lakina, and Tom Hughes and who was both Morgan Staker Ads and Tom Houston who was at Pebble. So I called him, and you know, I grew up in eastern Oregon in a very small town. I knew what Pebble Beach was. You know, I'd watched you know, TV all that fun stuff and was shocked. When he got back to me. He was like, yep, you don't know problem. We can host she is an intern. So I went down there for six months and Jack Holt, who was a longtime assistant there, I think he sensed that I probably needed to be tough ened up a little bit. And Mark Machatt had been the superintendent there from ninety two to ninety nine. He said, you know, you should probably go back east and just kind of challenge yourself a little bit. Well, Mishot had moved on to Shinnacock. So now this is two thousand and two, March of two thousand and two, so I went back to Shinnecock and did six months back there, which you know, like I said, I'm a small town eastern Oregon kid. That was an eye opener, just both agronomically, you know, from a social standpoint the Hampton's Like, I had no concept of what that was really and so it was just it was very interesting, but it was it was awesome. I learned a ton you know. That was probably the most extensive i'll say staff i'd been on as far as guys with degrees and just base of knowledge. It was. It was an awesome experience, but I realized, I'm not I love the industry, but I'm not going to do it on these coasts. Like It's just it's a very different world back there. So coming back finished that one last quarter of school. Both Tom Huskin and michhad were good friends with Jeff Marco and just happened Jeff Cypress was posted a spray tech job and so applied for it and was fortunate enough to to get that job, and I wish I would have stuck around longer. Jeff was awesome to work with obviously, Cypress Points an incredible place. Stayed there for ten to eleven months, I think, and then took the job up at the Olympic Club. A guy that I had worked with at Pebble was an assistant on one of the two courses the end Olympic Club, and Pat had gotten there trying to think pack got there and I think in February of two and I came up in October of three, so he hadn't been there more than a year and a half. And it was very it was an awesome time to get there. I was twenty five years old, so super naive, and it was a union staff, so they taught me a lot about patients, to say the least. But it was Yeah, I've had I was just telling you before this that I've probably blown all my professional karma, if you will. Been very, very fortunate to work for a lot of great guys and a lot of neat facilities, that's for sure.

00:34:33
Speaker 2: Pebble, Shinnacok and Cyprus.

00:34:34
Speaker 1: That's it was awesome. That's pretty decent. Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

00:34:38
Speaker 2: Three top ten golf courses. So Olympic Club just looking at the aerials from the time that you were there. Now, I'm not saying that you personally did all of this work, went out and took out those trees by the roots yourself, but quite a few trees came out at the Olympic Club during your tenure there, which was mostly in the first decade of the two thousands. So you know, I'm curious when it comes to a club like that, which prides itself on difficulty and for a long time was identified with this idea of a tree lined championship golf course, what's it like to be involved in taking out trees there?

00:35:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's funny because you know, you think about it when you get there in your twenty five and you think you know what you're doing, and you think you know a lot about the intricacies of what's going on and politically how it goes goes about, but you realize you're just a dumb kid at that point and you're trying to figure it out. I would say some of it was for agonomic reasons that I'm just thinking. Between two and four there were a gazillion eucalyptus trees up there that were taken out for good reason. They were just kind of a trash tree some of it.

00:35:54
Speaker 2: Totally agreed. Thank you for saying that Eucalyptus trees drive me nuts as a native California and just there they're all over the place. They don't belong there.

00:36:03
Speaker 1: They're gonna, yeah, they're dirty, they yeah, they just.

00:36:06
Speaker 2: They shed all over the place too, like they're a danger. If you stand under one for too long, they're gonna they're gonna get you.

00:36:12
Speaker 1: And it's yeah, they're they're not they're not great. And so I would say, you know, there were some of that, and then but then you look at the the I'll say, the population of the rest of the golf course or the tree canopy was you know, a lot of money pines and a lot of Monterey cypress trees, and the Monterey cypress trees a lot of those that were lost daring storms were they were they weren't necessarily taken care of for a series of years, and so they weren't thinned out and they they just were so heavy and such big kites basically that they just fell over uprooted. So a little bit of loss there, But then the monorary pines were the ones that really were I'll say the the larger of the group that that came out that they just weren't very healthy trees. They kind of died from the crown down. I'm telling you for a start of the podcast that the seven Amateur so before they used to do them with flyovers with helicopters, and so Pat let me go up for a couple of holes in the helicopter, and we always knew these these trees were not super healthy. You could kind of see him dying back and they just needles turning colors. And then you get up in a helicopter on top of them, You're like, oh, these are a lot worse than I thought. Like, there's a lot of just dead canopies in the Topsy's trees. So a lot of them were just they would uproot, they would just die and you'd have to take them out. So, yeah, there was some active nature to taking trees out, but at the same time, a lot of it was natural attrition during storms or whatever the case is.

00:37:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it became a little bit easier from that perspective to you know, kind of gradually maybe change ideas about trees at the club. That's it's a good model for a lot of clubs. You know, you kind of do it over time. You don't have to do it all at once.

00:38:01
Speaker 1: Correct. And I would say, you know, somewhat similar to this that at Waverley that the Pacific Northwest is right, wrong or different. They love their trees and we have a ton of them, and they're beautiful. I get it, but you really struggle on a lot of levels from both the playability and agronomic standpoint when you have huge tree canopies. And that was one of the things that Gil We knew that was going to be an uphill climb, but he is. He's so good at talking with members, very patient and can explain that these are the reasons you don't want these. And it was comical because there were people that were fighting us tooth and nail at the beginning of this process, and there weren't that many people. It really was. There was a few people, but by the end of the process they were coming up with ideas of trees to remove, and so you're like, Okay, I think we finally turned the corner on this that everybody seeing the benefits from a visibility and playability standpoint to opening up this proper. So it was a lot of fun.

00:39:02
Speaker 2: So you bring up the Gil Hants restoration. You started here around twenty ten, which is around the same time that Gil was hired, and maybe started his work a year or two later. So take me through that process. What was the scope of the work that Gil did and what were some of the main accomplishments of it.

00:39:26
Speaker 1: So I started your March one of twenty ten. I think Gil's first sight visit was in April, so a month and month and a half later or something like that. And I don't know if he does this on every job, I believe on most of his restorations, but he does them in sink six hole increments. So first one he comes out, looks at six holes. He's looking at the whole property, but he formulates the ideas. On his next trip out, he presents those six holes to the committee, looks at the next six and so on and so forth. And so by the third trip, when he's formula an ideas on the I'll say thirteen through eighteen, he's kind of presenting a finalized ya one of finalized idea of one through six so it was we had a committee, a subcommittee of the Green Committee that was the Master Blande Committee. It was very thoughtful Gil. He wouldn't he's great at what he does, wouldn't be as popular as he was or is if if he wasn't really good at it. And yeah, he just was able to very thoughtfully walk people through what we had and how much better it could be. There were when I wasn't involved in the interview process because it was prior to my starting, but there were four the interviewed four architects, and I won't say the other three, but three of the four all said, Hey, if you don't want to restore this, I'm probably not your guy. There was one group that proposed a ten million dollar blow up and it was changing the routing and you know, seventy one hundred yards kind of a deal. And the club didn't have, you know, a great taste for doing that. So yeah, came in. Let's see, we started in August of eleven with mainline work on the irrigation side of things and a bunch of drainage work, and then I think pretty much September one started with some of the more intensive holes. So sixteen was one of the first ones we blew up because it used to be a kind of a blind t shot punch bowl concept into a green, but it was only because in nineteen twelve when they re routed it, you were playing in to an old existing green that was in it from a different angle, so you're almost like playing over the right green surrounds of an old hole. So that was one of the most dramatic changes and involved a fair amount of opening of the earth. So we kind of started there, but it was rebuilding, really moving a lot of bunkers and rebuilding mall, so we went from fifty four bunkers to eighty nine. This picture behind me as a nineteen thirty six aerial from the corp of Engineers. So one of the benefits of being on the willam At rivers when they started doing aurials in the thirties, we have those images.

00:42:05
Speaker 2: So interesting because they're taking photos of the Willamette Yeah River corridor a lot probably and the golf course shows up in there and looking at those comparing them to the aerials that I've seen of the course as it was before the restoration, there's a lot of variety and size of bunkers too, So it's not just an increase in the number of bunkers. But you've got some big ones, you've got some little ones, you've got different kind of quirky arrangements of them.

00:42:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's there were from a technology standpoint, there were some that made no sense in putting them back exactly where they were, so obviously thought fully placed them where they would have the not necessarily the most impact, but the greatest variety and make you think about playing the golf course. So, yeah, rebuild all bunkers. Do a lot of fairway expansions, a fair amount of greens expansions, rebuilt probably a third of the teas. Took out a lot of trees, as I mentioned three hundred, and I think we ended up on three seventy five from when I first started real till probably over a two year span. And when I say, some of them were massive seqoia trees, and then there were others that were some little fruit tree that nobody even noticed. We took out so a lot. When I say three and seventy five trees, it wasn't three and seventy five mature doug furs. There was a lot of a variety. In fact, you could almost debate. It was an arboretum. Like a lot of classic gold places. You could almost see where people it was. A green committee chairman in the you know, seventies or eighties, said well, there's an open space over there, how about we go plant this. We don't have this species out here, so let's go plant one over there.

00:43:40
Speaker 2: A lot of a lot of the work got done, or like you know, somebody in the area has a has a sale on a certain kind of tree, and it's like, oh, well, hey, almost free.

00:43:49
Speaker 1: Yeah as well, yeah, and that's really the So the predominant species, I'll take a sidebar, but the predominant species. There's a lot of dug furs out here, and then you'll see a lot of sequoias, which are not a native tree. And I believe the story goes that in the late sixties there was a lumber guy that on a lumber mill and he a generous donation to the club of whatever was one hundred and fifty secoiatries. And I'm only assuming the thought process is, well, we'll plant all these and there's no way all of them will survive, you know, some of them just die during the summer months, and not a one of them died. And so you had a ton of sequoia trees all over the place, and we maybe took out a third of them, let's say, so there's still a number of them out here. But yeah, they were all over the place. And you know the other thing that thinking about, and I think this has been talked about ad nauseum, but when in the Pacific Northwest, when you stick a tree on a golf course, the only limiting factors that it has in nature, you know, it's not getting fertilized and it's not getting supplemental rain during the summer months. Well, you put it on a golf course and you're fertilizing it. You know, he's fertilized rough once a year, but you're fertilizing it and then it's getting supplemental irrigation throughout the year. And so what looks to be a sixty or seventy year old sakoya is really only about forty years old at this point.

00:45:03
Speaker 2: Fifty years hold up the process by here, Yeah, because this is a place where trees thrive anyway, Yes, and so if you give them more encouragement, then they're just gonna sprout.

00:45:12
Speaker 1: They go crazy. Yeah, and so yeah, it was crazy improvement to the golf course and members, you know, we're just so excited about it. You know. It was just you know, they'd gotten used to playing the same old golf course and it was a great It's still it was a great golf course, and it obviously is still, but I think just a little more variety in the layout. It makes you think a little bit more about getting around the golf course where it wasn't just keep it between the trees and try to avoid the fifty four bunkers out there. It was a big improvement, that's for sure.

00:45:48
Speaker 2: So when Gil was out here, he was a well established architect. He had done the restoration at Los Angeles Country Club and had gotten a number of really high profile jobs. But I think it was while he was doing the work here that he got the job at the Rio Olympic Course, which really shot him to stardom in the architecture industry. And so he was at an interesting point in his career at Waverley where you got him fairly early on, and he also had some associates and shapers with him who have gone on to have interesting architecture careers of their own. So you know, from what you observed while they were doing their work, what kind of struck you about their process, about their approach, anything to do with that.

00:46:32
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just a totally different skill set. I'm not an artistic person. So it always blows my mind where you can see going from a two D drawing to three D and you think you understand a lot about it, and then when they can take it from two D and they can they try to explain to you what it's going to look like. But when you go from two D to three D, it's just it's pretty incredible on how just talented operators are really incredible. So, yeah, Gil was out here majority of the project. He would kind of do two weeks stints where he would be here for three or four days every two weeks. But Kyle Franz was his guy on the ground. Kyle's from all the each you know, two hours south of town here and it was you know, Kyle played here I think in high school or something to that effect, and so it was a good opportunity for him. He had I think he got a career started at Pacific Dunes.

00:47:26
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, yeah, he has a whole story about how he got that job, but basically it's almost like he just wandered on the golf course and was like, I'm you know, I'm interested in doing this, and they basically brought him on board.

00:47:38
Speaker 1: Which I say this lovingly, but if you know Kyle, that fits the that fits the bill, I mean that sounds like something he would have done. So, yeah, he lived. He lived in the cottage, which is in the middle of the golf course for nine months. And yeah, it was just it was so unique. I'd been around kind of more in house construction projects than anything at previous and employers, but this was one where it was you're bringing in outside shapers and these guys not only are putting the drawings together, but then turning that into reality, and so it was. It was just it's really incredible. You know, people that are talented in ways that you are not. It just makes it that much more impressive. And both those guys obviously are and Kyle, you know, kind of I think probably I'm not sure what year he did Midpines, maybe fourteen fifteen.

00:48:31
Speaker 2: Yes, it was a little layered, it wasn't It wasn't that long after this job I think yeah.

00:48:37
Speaker 1: So yeah, he kind of went on kind of hung out down in the Caroline is there for the last number of years and is continuing to get a good combination of a couple of new builds and some restoration work along the way. So yeah, it was it was fun working with those guys. Jim Wagner, who's obviously Gill's design partner, I think he made two trips out, but you know, Florida to Portland is not not allowed direct flights, so yeah, yeah, Basically Kyle is the guy on the ground and Gill would make his visits every once every two weeks. But it was a lot of fun.

00:49:10
Speaker 2: I don't know why it cracks me up, but it sort of cracks me up thinking about Kyle friends or really any shaper living in that cottage on the golf course and working on the golf course. Talk about like no work life separation. You know, you're right there, literally in the middle of it. This cottage is right next to the tenth Green. To give people an idea, and it's a I mean, it's a lovely place. I'd imagine it's a really fun to stay there.

00:49:38
Speaker 1: It was, so it was originally in greenskeeper's cottage. Probably, Oh, I'm gonna guess it was built in the thirties or so. Two guys before me get named Rich Schwabauer. He lived there from sixty eight to ninety eight, raised two kids in the house. In fact, one of his son sells his equipment.

00:49:54
Speaker 2: What a place to grow up. That would be crazy.

00:49:56
Speaker 1: I mean, yes, it would be awesome. But at the same time, his son it should tell me stories about you know, somebody didn't like something was going on ten Green. They knock on the front door, and you're like, well, that's that's kind of a problem.

00:50:06
Speaker 2: You know, I was a boarding school teacher before I took this job. It reminds me of that, where you just have people kind of like knocking on your door all night long.

00:50:14
Speaker 1: And so his the gentleman that was here in between rich Swabar and myself. I'm only assuming, you know, there was probably a conversation with his wife and she said, you're crazy if you think we're living in the mill of golf course or something like that. And so it was turned into intern housing, which I don't even I don't even know how to describe what that house looked like when I got here, it was it was not good. And so when we started kind of entertaining, we're getting down to logistics of Gil being out here in this, that and the other in the GM at the time, Scott Julian Gil was obviously going to rent an apartment somewhere in town and you know, the set and the other, and Scott said, well, why don't we just put some money into that thing and they can live there and then we can turn it into a member rental option. So that's long story short, that's what's happened. It really only gets rented for weddings, you know, that kind of thing. But every once in a while somebody will bring three buddies into town and they stay out there and it's it is very unique. It's a great setting. You're you know whatever. That is seventy five yards from the bank of the river. Yeah, it's a neat, neat experience, but it is right in the middle of golf course.

00:51:23
Speaker 2: All right, perfect, Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, and good luck next week. I think it's gonna be a great championship.

00:51:30
Speaker 1: No, we're looking forward to it. It'll be very interesting to see. You know. We talked about that discrepancy, and it'll be interesting to ski what the low half of the field does to this. Hopefully it defends itself pretty well. But yeah, we're looking forward to it, that's for sure.

00:51:43
Speaker 2: I think it will defend itself. It defends itself against me pretty well when I have a chance to come out here and play, so I know that for sure. This episode of the Frida Egg Golf podcast was produced and edited by Matt Ruschis. Thank you, Matt. One big thing that you can do to support Friday Golf is to sign up for our membership CLUBTFE. Go to thefridagg dot com slash membership to see what it's all about. One of the things that we do in CLUBTFE is a blog where we post new content every week, including a weekly course profile, a weekly preview of that week's televised competitive golf called what to Watch For, and something that we released just yesterday, Design Notebook. This is a new feature in CLUBTFE and it's basically a rundown of news, inside information, scuttle butt, opinions, insights on what's going on in golf course architecture today. We're pretty excited about it. We're having a lot of fun producing these articles and the members seem to be enjoying them. So that's in CLUBTFE and again you can check it out at the Fridagg dot com calm slash membership. Thank you for listening and we'll be back again soon