Master Greenkeeper John Quinn is the author of Performance Bowling Greens, and several other titles on Greenkeeping, Club and Business Management.
When asked to name their club’s greatest asset, most club members will without hesitation say “the green”.
As a green maintenance company you wouldn’t expect us to put up much of an argument against that now would you?
Well, of course the green is of major importance to all clubs, but when your club starts to take a more business focused view on management as described in Read more
Being able to discern your club’s position with regards to its member loyalty ratio can appear rather tricky if not virtually impossible sometimes. When your member or customer base is made up of disparate groups with differing interests and priorities, which of course it should be, it can be difficult to keep track of how well you are doing overall.
This, unfortunately puts a lot of clubs off trying to find out how they are doing in the eyes of their customers and they only realise things aren’t going well when its too late to do anything about it.
However, thankfully there are some tried and tested methods that can be used to achieve this goal.
Working it out
Being able to retain a loyal member base has obvious benefits and understanding member sentiment is pivotal to achieving this loyalty factor.
Taking the time to focus on understanding the level of each member’s loyalty is both prudent and beneficial to the long term health of your club. Once you have a feel for this, the club management can then take the necessary action to try to prevent potentially loyal customers from just being casual visitors.
Here are the top 4 things to seriously consider in trying to understand the club’s position within the mindset of the various member and user groups:
This article is an extract from Bowling Club Membership Retention and Growth, which builds upon the concepts of the customer or club user as discussed in Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround.
Tomorrow I will introduce the concept of “a target audience”, maybe not something that comes naturally to most clubs.
This question arises a lot in my travels. Usually for one reason:
The greenkeeper is trying to follow his or her own “imagined” version of my Performance Greens Program and has distilled this down to just the “no topdressing” bit!
The slightly skewed logic then dictates that they don’t remove any plugs (cores) from the green this year due to the fact that they won’t be topdressing and will therefore leave holes that won’t be filled in and of course won’t be healed for next season.
So depending on the soil and turf conditions solid tining can be useful or not so useful.
If the green is thatchy and wet, solid tining will at best achieve nothing but at worst actually cause things to deteriorate by compacting the surface even further by creating holes with smeared edges that don’t allow water through.
On reasonably healthy greens where the underlying thatch is under control and the soil is reasonably friable, solid tining can create some good air space to allow soil microbes to thrive and to allow surface water roots and wetting agents down through the surface. It can also create a good seed bed for new seed if conditions are generally good.
I also recommend solid tining for heads and LDP affected areas prior to wetting agent application in the summer although this is usually with smaller, pencil type tines.
So overall it has its uses, but if it is merely being used to square the equation “what will we do if we aren’t top-dressing” then it is flawed logic.
On a thatchy green, there is no reason why hollow tining shouldn’t be employed even although you won’t be filling the holes afterwards.
An alternative program that actually makes a difference is discussed here.
Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC) is a measure of a soil’s ability to retain essential plant nutrients in the form of chemical ions and therefore its ability to provide sufficient nutrition to grass plants.
A while back I wrote a more in-depth article on this subject which included suggestions for increasing or boosting CEC. You can read it here.
What is the single most important area of maintenance to concentrate on for a performance green?
If we want to save money on bowling green maintenance, where should we concentrate our spending?
What will give us the most bang for our buck?
3 variations of the same question that crop up on an almost daily basis here at bowls-central.
The answer is Thatch.
However, this simple one word answer is almost never received with the open arms I expect it to be.
After asking questions like the above, it seems that most enquirers are instantly deflated and disappointed with the brevity and simplicity of the answer, but this is the very essence of Performance Bowling Green Maintenance.
Click here to get started on your journey to a Performance Bowling Green.
