Stimpmeter

Many podcasts go on for hours. Mine often do. But this one is only 20 minutes, and for information density—a lot of useful insight in a short time—this particular episode is hard to beat.

Korai (Zoysia) putting greens have a distinctive roll because of the stiff leaf blades. One consequence of this is a slower green speed than bermudagrass when given the same maintenance.

Chris Tritabaugh has been writing an extraordinarily interesting series of blog posts. The topic, broadly, is putting green management and putting green performance. That’s a big topic, obviously. Chris, on his blog, has been taking a route through it that describes what he’s been doing and what he’s been measuring.

Chris Tritabaugh and I met to review the OM246 test results from samples collected in October 2021 at Hazeltine National Golf Club. We did this as a livestream episode of ATC Office Hours, which is available for watching or listening at your leisure.

You won’t find these at every golf course in Japan, but it is common to see a green condition (グリーンコンディション) information board prominently displayed at the clubhouse. The Facebook page for Monthly Golf Management magazine (月刊ゴルフマネジメント) shared a beautiful photo gallery with representative examples of these green condition boards.

When Cam Shaw wrote with a question about measuring smoothness and trueness, he mentioned that he’d searched my blog and didn’t find anything. “Wow,” I thought, “have I really written nothing about this?

The Brede equation is essential to my work. I often use the stimpmeter to measure the ball roll distance (green speed) of putting greens. But there’s a problem. It can take a long time to find an area flat enough to make the measurement. On some greens, there is so much slope that one cannot make an official measurement.

This story by Chris Tritabaugh starts with ambivalence about the stimpmeter, then goes on to explain what changed. These are the key results, with emphasis mine: Since I started stimping our greens every day, I cannot remember a complaint about greenspeed.

I get to see a lot of bermudagrass and zoysiagrass putting greens. In fact, most of my golf is played on one of those two surfaces. Sometimes people ask me about the ball roll on zoysia compared with roll on bermudagrass.

You’ve seen the trailer and heard the bleeps. Now, you can watch the full episode. This is “Flying Blind”, Episode 3 in Season 1 of my Grammar of Greenkeeping show.