Three-Week Turf Course: Curriculum

Learn how to manage and maintain landscape plants. This unit covers proper planting procedures, pruning techniques, and design basics. You’ll also learn to identify shade and small trees, deciduous shrubs, and groundcovers, and understand how best to use each type in your golf course landscape.

Receive an introduction to golf course design principles and their effects on golf course construction, including contours, slopes, tee construction, and sand bunker construction. You will gain a sound, basic understanding of principles and methods for constructing ponds, cart paths, and greens as well as costs, scheduling, and contracts.

This unit takes the mystery out of even the most complex irrigation system. It presents fundamentals of components, installation, and repair, including sprinklers, nozzles, valves, wiring, pipes, control system components, and accessories. It also includes a review of winterization, spring set-up, and other practical aspects of an irrigation system.

To grow high-quality turf, you need to understand the physical properties of soils, including soil components, texture, structure, and density. In this lively and challenging unit, explore soil-water movement with applications in drainage and aeration; chemical properties of soils, including soil colloids; cation exchange capacity; acidity; and the essential elements of soil health.

How and when you choose to fertilize can either help or hurt your turfgrass. This unit focuses on identifying and assessing fertilizers and how to use them for growing healthier turfgrass, trees, and shrubs.

If you want to be successful in the turfgrass industry, you must know how to identify and control the most common golf turf diseases. The information this unit teaches you about turfgrass diseases will be applicable every day your on the job. You’ll walk away with great information and even greater confidence in your ability to maintain outstanding turf for your course!

Identifying insects, understanding their life cycles, and managing your “favorite” insect pests are reviewed in this very practical and entertaining unit.

Do you know what your management style is? Any successful golf course superintendent certainly needs to. Leadership dynamics, motivational strategies, and strategic planning on the golf course are critical to your success. Learn about these essential skills and how to make them work for you and your course.

Identifying, classifying, and understanding how weeds reproduce are all critical skills. Applying pesticides, calibrating your spray equipment, and controlling weeds on the golf course through cultural and chemical methods round out this stimulating unit.

What’s the perfect height for golf turf? The answer may surprise you! Find out what you’ve been doing right or wrong in this session. You’ll learn how to select the proper machinery for the correct cutting height and discover the ins and outs of the most common pieces of golf maintenance equipment.

Do you have lakes, ponds, or steams on your course? This unit will teach you how to keep the water clean, the nearby banks safe, and the surrounding areas playable.

This highly practical unit presents techniques, plans, and specifications for establishing turfgrass, including seeding, sprigging, and sodding.

Turfgrass management practices, including mowing, watering, fertilizing, cultivation, and controlling thatch in turf, are important for maintaining an outstanding course while managing your expenses. This unit covers how to maintain a great playing surface on established turf.

Understanding the different turfgrasses and their lifecycles helps you keep consistent appearance and texture on your course. Learn about the identification, morphology, and development of turfgrasses. Agronomic identification, characteristics and selection of grasses, seed production, seed certification, and grass breeding also will be covered.

Renovating a golf course is different from maintaining it. Learn techniques and methods for improving turfgrass and for introducing new cultivars on your greens, fairways, and tees.

Managing Bentgrass or Poa Annua on golf greens is difficult. During this lecture, you will learn how you can better manage each of these species and when it makes sense to use one species over another.