Only one trophy is scheduled to be awarded at the end of this week’s Greater Richmond Golf Classic at Richmond Country Club but perhaps a second needs to be in the making. Despite record-setting temperatures and little rain throughout the year, the RCC golf course will nearly be up to par when the professionals tee off on Friday morning; largely due to the work of Golf Course Superintendent Greg McCue and his staff.

  “Overall we’re in pretty good shape,” McCue said thankful for the rain that fell three days last week. “That’s really making everything green back up from being extremely dry.”

  But if it wasn’t for RCC greens crews, there would be little left to green back up.

  The year has been the most challenging in McCue’s 35 years in the business. “This is the worst summer I’ve ever seen,” he said. “I’ve had summers where I might have a bad July, but June and August are nice. I’ve never had one where it started with record-breaking, above average temperatures in May, record-breaking, above average temperatures in June and July basically the same way.”

  When it comes to golf course maintenance, it is the lack of humidity rather than the high temperatures that does the most damage. “We actually like the high humidity because the grass tends to shut down and not use as much water during that time frame,” McCue said. With low humidity, regardless of rainfall, the grass quickly uses all the water in the soil. The summer root systems of the grass shrink to as little as a half inch. “That’s all the water it has to pull from,” McCue said. “So even if you get a half inch to an inch to two inches of rain your root system is so short that the next day, if there’s low humidity, like 30 percent or something, you don’t have much reservoir to pull from.”

  When the temperature is in the upper 80’s with low humidity the crews really have to scramble to cool down the greens. “That’s far worse for it than the times when it’s a 100 degree day and 60 percent humidity,” McCue said. “Just because it’s more likely that the grass will dry up completely and die on us.” 

  Under such conditions, keeping up with 6500 yard golf course is quite a duty for McCue and a crew of less than a dozen, but somehow they’ve managed to keep things close to the level they have been for the past two Duramed events. “I would say we’re not as good as we were the last two years but the last two years were extremely good summers,” McCue said. “We’ve lost some grass on the collars outside around the greens. We’ve lost some on our greens but just about all of our greens have recovered. We’ve got a few bad spots here and there but for the majority we’re probably 90 percent of what we were.”

  With a forecast of triple-digit temperatures for the week and into the tournament, McCue’s work will get no easier and he plans to cool the greens three, possibly four times in the afternoons prior to Friday. Once play gets underway he plans to cut those cooling periods in half, but will monitor the situation and temporarily halt play for coolings if the conditions warrant. “We could lose grass very easily in half an hour, 45 minutes, getting up that high and that’s when it really depends on the humidity,” McCue said.

  He added that the tournament and players are understanding such interruptions. “They know they’re only here for a week and we give them such a good playing surface a majority of the time that they’re very understanding,” McCue said. “We have 500 members that we have to cater to after they leave and they want to leave the place in as good of shape as they can.”