For two weeks each year, Brandon Reese might be the hardest working man in the golf business anywhere on the planet. As the Director of Golf Course Operations at TPC Louisiana, Reese is the superintendent charged with preparing the course for the Zurich Classic, one of the South’s biggest PGA Tour events of the year. And he’s more accustomed than most to preparing for Tour play in extreme environments: before coming to TPC Louisiana in 2015, Reese worked as an assistant superintendent at TPC Craig Ranch near Dallas, and as the superintendent at TPC San Antonio and TPC Scottsdale. This year, though, presents unique challenges for him and his staff: an unusually rainy winter and spring — even by south Louisiana standards — ahead of what has emerged as one of the PGA Tour’s most popular tournaments.
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LYING FOUR: So what’s your life like the last two week before the tournament? Is it just wall-to-wall insanity, or is it too late for insanity?
BRANDON REESE: I’ve been doing tournament golf for a long time, close to 15 years. I mean, we know it’s coming. We’re already kind of mentally prepped for it. It’s not us going crazy — it’s everybody else. We’re just trying to avoid the crazy.
LYING FOUR: What does your day look like this close to the tournament?
BRANDON REESE: We’re working, like, 12-hour days right now. You’re down in the Deep South, you know how rainy it’s been. Weather dictates so much of what we do: we have a pretty good schedule set forth, and then it’ll rain, and then we almost feel like we’re back at square one. Your list continues to get longer, because you lose so much time to weather down here. Right now we’re trying to capitalize on good weather, ramping up mowing frequencies. We’re trying to mow everything at least once a day, sometimes more. Sometimes our greens get mowed twice a day, three times a day, depending on what we’re going for. We’re lucky enough to be closed this week, so we’re just doing a lot of detail-type stuff that’s tough to get done when you’ve got a lot of paying customers on the golf course, because you’re trying not to impact the experience.
LYING FOUR: What are the specific challenges of a winter and spring as wet as we’ve had down here?
BRANDON REESE: You know, I came out here from the desert, where it gets like five inches of rain a year, so I kind of consider this to be like growing grass in a Petri dish. Generally, we don’t have to worry too much about disease pressure on fairways and short-grass areas other than greens, but this year we’ve kind of battled a little bit of disease in some fairways. So watching that, knowing when to pull the trigger and make that application so it doesn’t have a detrimental effect. When it rains and rains and rains, and you don’t have any drying period, that’s when it really starts to impact us. It affects our decision making process, but it affects the morale of the staff far greater than it impacts us on the golf course. We’re talking daily with our staff about how much we have to do, and then there’s just no time to do it. We try to be cheerleaders, but the weather can be — and I enjoy the rain, especially after being out in the desert. The rain is soothing at times, until it turns into waterboarding.
LYING FOUR: What are the differences between setting up for tournament week versus the other 50 or 51 weeks out of the year?
BRANDON REESE: We like to think that we produce conditions at a pretty high level here. But when you get into tournament prep and preparing for a PGA Tour event, it’s the repetition at which you do it that is so much different. When we get into — we call this “advance week,” before “tournament week” — we’re mowing all our short grass twice a day a lot of times, whereas in the middle of June or July, we may be mowing our fairways four times a week, not 14 times a week. That repetition is something that daily fee or members don’t really get to experience. And the tournament hours are long hours. You get into 12-hour days, and then you get into the actual tournament, where our staff is starting at 4 in the morning and sometimes not getting out of here until 10:30 or 11 at night. The days are long, for sure.
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LYING FOUR: I looked at your yardage guide on the website, and I counted a hundred bunkers on your golf course. Are there unique challenges to setting up TPC Louisiana compared to other places you’ve worked?
BRANDON REESE: Yeah, there’s no question that the bunkering out here plays a major factor in how we prepare the golf course every day. I mean, that’s a lot of acreage. We have changed some of those areas up over the course of the year, to where some of those bunkers that you see on the website are now what is known to the Rules of Golf as “general areas,” something you and I probably would have called “waste areas” in the past. That’ll help us a tremendous amount, because we won’t prepare those every day unless we get rain or something like that. We’ll rake them out and maybe touch them up over the course of the week, rather than raking them out twice a day. I think it’s going to be a really good aesthetic change to the golf course, but obviously it helps with daily preparation and maintenance as well, which is one reason we did it. This property is a little bit challenging — have you ever been out here?
LYING FOUR: Yes.
BRANDON REESE: This golf course, in a lot of areas, is below sea level. I think the lowest place on the golf course is minus-four. And we drain pretty good, but when you have incessant rainfall — I mean, I can only assume that the water table here is extremely shallow, especially when you’re sitting below sea level. So when you’ve got a subsurface that’s kind of inundated, it can make those bunkers a challenge. And we’re working on some plans to improve those really quickly, but they can be a little bit of a challenge if we get weather during the event.
LYING FOUR: Is there anything different at all about setting up for a team event rather than an individual event? Does that factor in at all, or do y’all still set up the same way you did 10 years ago?
BRANDON REESE: I think for our preparation — from an agronomic standpoint — it’s relatively the same. I will say that green speeds are a little faster here now that we’re playing a team event — not drastically, but our PGA Tour rules officials maybe don’t have to be as conservative with some of the pin locations or the green speeds. They’re kind of dictating back to us. Contrary to what most people believe, the golf course superintendent does not dictate green speeds during a PGA Tour event. We work along with several different bodies to make sure the greens are at the right speeds during a competition.
LYING FOUR: What are you expecting by the time guys get out there next Thursday? Do you expect the course to be a little softer than usual?
BRANDON REESE: It’s hard to tell, because this golf course can dry out and get firm really quick. If you can get a week without rain, we have the ability to de-water this property — or pump water off — really quickly: 50, 60, 70,000 gallons a minute. So we can purge our drainage system pretty quick. We’re expecting a little bit of rain this Thursday — maybe an inch, maybe two. Sometimes they say an inch and you get six. We’ll see what happens. But the weather for the week of the event looks pretty promising, so I’ll assume that we’re going to have firm conditions for this property at this time of year. It’s not going to be pool-table firm, but it should be a pretty firm test — if it doesn’t rain anymore.