Golf Courses With Artificial Turf Greens?

[saevel25]

I found this interesting. 

The greens are fake at this golf course. But the feels (and savings) are real

---

A Florida course has renovated its greens using artificial turf. Might this approach hint at the future of golf-course design?

I would play a course with artificial greens, if they were top quality and almost identical to actual greens. 

Edited July 31, 2023 by saevel25

[klineka]

Interesting concept. 

With all the talk about how much money they are saving/will save by going artificial, I'd expect the greens fees to be cheaper too. Otherwise I don't really see the benefit for me. (selfishly of course but then again it's my money that I'd be spending to play there)

If there was lets say a $20 9 hole executive course with real greens and a $20 executive course with the artificial greens, I'd choose the real greens almost every time assuming everything else was comparable. 

[iacas]

1 minute ago, klineka said:

If there was lets say a $20 9 hole executive course with real greens and a $20 executive course with the artificial greens, I'd choose the real greens almost every time assuming everything else was comparable. 

Not if those real greens were shit, like these supposedly were.

---

I'll be interested to see how the $750k he spent holds up over five+ years when he is "getting his money back" out of them. Florida sun (and rain) can be BRUTAL.

Out indoor (SynLawn) putting green is still great. We just re-purposed it in our new location. But it barely gets much light and never gets rain, or cold, etc.

[woodzie264]

@iacas, any experience with playing into artificial greens (not putting)…thinking about approaches landing and holding the greens vs bouncing off

[iacas]

37 minutes ago, woodzie264 said:

@iacas, any experience with playing into artificial greens (not putting)…thinking about approaches landing and holding the greens vs bouncing off

Ours reacts like a green. You might know this if you came up anytime in the last six years or so. 🤣

[ohioglfr]

At least there's no divots to fix.

[ChetGPT]

1 hour ago, ohioglfr said:

At least there's no divots to fix.

At risk of being pedantic, aren't they called ball marks?

[billchao]

Don’t artificial turfs get hot? Would that be a problem in Florida?

[ChiTown]

At my first house I put in a Pelz surface in my backyard because we couldn’t grow grass in the area. The house recently went back on the market so I went to look at the green. After 10+ years of Chicago winters and summers it was still in great shape. It was also really easy to maintain so I can see how smaller courses could benefit from something like this. 
 

Also, didn’t Tiger Woods just put in a huge miniature golf place in Florida all with artificial turf? 

[klineka]

On 8/5/2023 at 9:38 AM, ChiTown said:

Also, didn’t Tiger Woods just put in a huge miniature golf place in Florida all with artificial turf? 

Miniature golf comes with the expectation of putting on artificial turf. I've never seen a dedicated miniature golf course have real grass greens, have you?

[ChiTown]

8 minutes ago, klineka said:

Miniature golf comes with the expectation of putting on artificial turf. I've never seen a dedicated miniature golf course have real grass greens, have you?

Actually yes. I played on one in Edina MN. I’m sure it can’t be the only one. 

[mailman]

At my club we have a few holes that regularly close in the winter due to becoming sodden quite quickly over any period of sustained rainfall. The club had sunk a lot of money in to drainage over the last couple years which has actually helped but it still doesn’t keep the holes open all year long.

Which has had me wondering For a while ow around if we could have some artificial temporary greens how that would work out for the club in general. 
 

Another point is our green keepers were stopped from using a particular spray a couple years ago to deal with nematodes, which they haven’t found anything that comes remotely close to the effectiveness of the old stuff. 
 

so maybe artificial greens have their place on certain courses eh? We probably wouldn’t get the same heat issues here that you do in Florida as well?!?

[ChiTown]

15 hours ago, mailman said:

so maybe artificial greens have their place on certain courses eh? We probably wouldn’t get the same heat issues here that you do in Florida as well?!?

I agree with you. For some courses it may make sense to use artificial greens. My guess is that like many things golf “purists” won’t like them. But this happened in pro baseball and football too. I can imagine that a high quality putting surface placed over sand could have a lot of the characteristics of real grass. 

[deadon500]

What about moving holes around the green ????

 

[saevel25]

3 minutes ago, deadon500 said:

What about moving holes around the green ????

 

I assume you could have predrilled holes, where you just cap them to open up a new hole. 

[CarlSpackler]

As @iacas said earlier, I wonder what the ROI is. Will this save money in the long run. If the ball reacts the same, I’m all for it. No more aeration!

[ChetGPT]

2 hours ago, deadon500 said:

What about moving holes around the green ????

 

I've played a course (par-3) course that has synthetic greens and teeboxes. It's fun to play and has descent "shot absorption". It's also low cost and you don't have to worry about the greens being punched. 

The holes, however, are always in the same place. 

Which doesn't really matter that much as the main reason to move the holes around are to even out the pitch marks and/or footprints, neither of which occur on the artificial greens. 

I imagine if you played the course every single day, you'd get use to the hole locations, but as it is the course is more of a lets have some fun for an hour (hour and a half tops) or get the kids out to play kind of place.  It's not hosting 4 day tournaments. 

[iacas]

8 hours ago, ChetlovesMer said:

Which doesn't really matter that much as the main reason to move the holes around are to even out the pitch marks and/or footprints, neither of which occur on the artificial greens. 

It might be the main reason, but it's not the only reason.