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Author: John

Master Greenkeeper John Quinn is the author of Performance Bowling Greens, and several other titles on Greenkeeping, Club and Business Management.

Mowing Height and the British Weather

It can be very tempting to get the mowing height on the green down as quickly as possible when the new season starts.

However, the weather can  be very unpredictable at this time of year with sudden and welcome warm spells being chased by almost winter conditions in a very short time frame. As a result there is a need for caution at this time of year when deciding on how quickly to reduce the mowing height on the green.

Performance Greens readers and regulars on this site will know that I generally recommend a mowing height of around 8mm through the winter months.

This should be reduced gradually to the summer height of 5mm with 4.5mm being the lowest recommended height for fine grasses.

At  this time we can sometimes be enjoying temperatures that we will be lucky to see even in July, and with a deft change in the wind direction our little island can seem like a completely different place and we are plunged back  into winter without notice.

Grass that has been chopped down quickly will suffer and I recommend that you stay up at 6mm even for opening day, aiming for 5mm in May, unless it’s snowing of course!

The Pursuit of Excellence and…economy.

Now that the new season is upon us, we’ve been getting a lot of enquiries asking two basic questions:

What is the ideal maintenance program to ensure an excellent bowling green surface this year? and…

How can we reduce costs for maintenance without compromising the performance of the green?

Well, although both of these questions are fairly easy to answer, the actual solution depends a lot on what has gone before and at what stage your green is at, in terms of performance at the moment.

The pursuit of excellence on a sensible budget is very much the theme of Performance Bowling Greens.

In the book you will find a step by step blueprint in layman’s terms where John explains the reasons why most bowling greens don’t perform to the required standard, or if they do, why they don’t seem capable of perfoming consistently over the long term.

Also in the book John talks about his philosophy on high performance bowling greens, what makes them and how to achieve a tournament quality green on a reasonable budget, consistently.

John said ” I decided to write this book to detail in layman’s terms the exact formula needed for a great bowling green. A formula that is based on thorough scientific research and experience”

He went on to say: “I also wanted to alert bowling club officials and greenkeepers to the 4 major obstacles that stand in their way, the 4 obstacles that repeatedly stop them from producing the green they desire, so that hopefully they can learn to spot these and avoid them in the future.”

You can get hold of your copy of Performance Bowling Greens here.

Teamwork

This week we have been looking at growing club membership and retaining current members.

One of the most important requirements for a project of this nature to be successful is a cohesive team where every member is aware of the goals and is committed to achieving success.

To work effectively and for one common goal within the club it is very important for all involved to share the same vision. This vision should be clearly defined so that all involved understand the direction in which the club is heading.

The key to achieving this level of commitment is Read more

Delivering exceptional service

Yesterday we looked at how your club might be organised in order to fulfil the expectations of its target audience and we boiled that down to a very distinct goal that any club would do well to work towards:

Deliver a little bit more than you promised!

We then went on to look at how this might be achieved consistently. We discussed how the seemingly endless task of business strategy development could be boiled down to its essence, making it a lot more tangible and do-able in the process.

Business strategy for me is about three things; three mini strategies if you like and these are people, finance and innovation.

Today, I wanted to briefly fill out these 3 bullet points to give you a clearer picture of how you can use them to your advantage and guarantee that your club members, user groups, customers or what have you, will always Read more

Differentiation

In all walks of life we see success and failure on a regular basis and we never seek to question why this happens; it’s obvious isn’t it?

One shop is successful and one fails to attract enough customers to survive; one tennis player wins Wimbledon and many others don’t; at closest quarters we see a friend narrowly lose a bowls match despite his or her best efforts and its sometimes difficult to see what they could possibly have done to beat that opponent.

Strange that we all understand this, but as a sport we are so readily accepting of the doom and gloom that says that bowling as a whole is on the downward spiral and is on the way out; whilst observing with our own eyes that some clubs are doing better than others!

Half a million bowlers aren’t about to disappear overnight, there are still plenty of opportunities for clubs who want success and longevity badly enough, but the world is a lot different today than it was in bowling’s heyday.

Differentiation; the art of making your club better and stronger should be the key goal. Ensuring that your club is an attractive proposition for as many and as diverse a set of users/members/customers as possible should be the target for every club today.

Its no longer good enough to try to attract more bowlers, set up a half hearted junior program or ignore the larger community that lives around your area.

Focus on what makes or could make your club “different” instead of what makes you the same; that’s the way to stand out from the crowd and the starting point for long term success.