It may not look like it from a quick glance on the ground, but gold season at the TS&M Woodlawn Golf Club is just around the corner.
The golf shop opened for general sales last week and the range won’t be too far behind.
“It always depends on the weather, and for the course, typically the third week of April is ideal,” said Woodlawn general manager and head golf professional Amanda Minchin, who won’t be rushing to get the 18-hole grass green course open. “We never like to rush it in the spring because if you rush it, you’re taking a chance of not having your best product May, June, July, August.”
Right now there’s a snow cover on the course but the frost was really deep. Minchin said superintendant Bob Currie won’t be able to tell exactly how well it wintered until the tarps fully come off.
“He’s optimistic,” she said. “The course went to bed in really good shape even with the drought we had in the fall. There hasn’t been a lot of time where he had open tarps where we had a melt and then it froze.”
There was other maintenance necessary at Woodlawn in the early spring, late winter period.
“He’s doing a little bit of tree work on the course, getting rid of a couple of trees that were causing some safety concerns for us, that were older and split down the middle,” Minchin said. “We were worried about them possibly breaking in a high wind… Everyone else is gearing up for the season and making sure we’ve got all our ducks in a row.”
This will be Minchin’s first year as general manager of the course, having added those duties to her head golf pro position in the winter. This has been a busier winter season for Minchin.
“It’s a little bit different and we’re in a little bit of a transition,” she said. “I think right now we’re going to have some new people coming in and we’re shifting around responsibilities and just trying to be a more efficient club on the operations side and trying to be a better place for our members and the community.”
The next couple of years Minchin said she’s excited about where things are headed for the club.
It was more of a challenge to get people thinking about golf with several last kicks from winter keeping snow on peoples’ minds.
“We’re signing up new members, which is always exciting and with our strong junior program, we’ll be seeing a lot more kids getting memberships, I hope,” she said. “We’ll have a better idea of that (this) month. The way things are going, I think our memberships are going to continue to be strong this year.”
