3 super solutions for common golf course issues
It’s your job to troubleshoot problems on your golf course. It’s our job to keep you informed of some of the most innovative, cutting-edge solutions for your golf course. Only in this month’s Golfdom will you find solutions for you to consider for bunker challenges, pathway problems and erosion failures. If you’re just learning about any of these golf maintenance problem-solvers, remember us when you utilize them at your course.
Lok-ing up steep bunker faces
To demonstrate to attendees at the 2025 GCSAA Conference and Trade Show in San Diego what LokSand is capable of, the company invited attendees to kneel down, grab a handful of bunker sand and pick it up. Most of it would immediately fall out of their hand; the only sand that stayed was what was firmly in grasp.
Then, they’d ask attendees to grab a handful of sand treated with LokSand — a crimped fiber that can be added to any sand or soil. Much more sand stays in one’s hand, like pulling a core from a green and seeing the dirt and sand attached to the roots.
“It’s a little bit of a black magic product, to be quite frank,” says Danny Potter, founder, owner and director of Centaur Asia Pacific, which represents products for golf, sports turf, nursery and lawn worldwide. “You don’t get compaction. You get drainage … you get firmness.”
The product is 15 years old but has been sitting on the shelf until recently. Previously, it was used for soccer fields in the United Kingdom or on roads for overflow dirt parking lots. Now, the folks behind LokSand are eager to show superintendents how it can help alleviate trouble areas on golf courses.
The golf-LokSand connection began when Australia’s Graham Marsh, a former touring pro with a host of wins worldwide, was designing the New Course at Singapore Island CC in 2019. He asked Potter if he had a solution to keep the tops of bunkers from collapsing after heavy rains during the wet season.
“To be fair, you would need a crew of 10 running around with fly mowers to maintain these bunkers,” Potter says. “They have these big, gnarly noses. I knew (about LokSand) and just thought outside the box.”
Potter showed what LokSand could do by building a steep bunker with it and one without. Marsh walked along the top of the bunker without LokSand, and the top caved in. Then he walked along the top of the bunker constructed with LokSand.
“He’s like, ‘What the (heck) is going on here? What have you done?’” Potter laughs. “He jumped up and down on it, and it didn’t move. It worked. Then he went and ordered two tons of the product and did all 27 holes of bunkers with it.”
To be clear, LokSand is not meant to be hit from — a golfer would break their club, or worse, their wrist. It is meant to be a stabilizing material for areas that typically crumble based on gravity, wash out or struggle with perennial wetness.
“The things you could do with it are amazing,” says Wayne Branthwaite, a former superintendent who has been the longtime vice president of Nick Price Golf Course Design. “It’s not just a bunker edge product. It’s a cart path product. It’s a solution for hardscapes. It doesn’t compact. You don’t get all that dust like you do with coquina or concrete.”
Potter says LokSand was recently used to build a playground in Melbourne, Australia, to solve the constant wear areas around the slides and swings. It was also used on a driving range near Brisbane Airport, built on a floodplain. When the tide comes up, it gets wet. The wet areas were replaced with rectangles of LokSand so grass could grow.
“It’s like a ready-made root system. When the grass grows into it, because of those pore spaces, the roots can grow quickly through this and intertwine through the fibers,” he says. “It’s not just binding the soils together. It’s giving the roots structure.”
One American course utilizing LokSand is Miakka GC near Myakka City, Fla. A Fry/Straka Global Golf Course Design project in conjunction with Paul Azinger, construction of the course is ongoing. The bunkers emulate Australian bunkering using LokSand for the vertical face. If a shot hits into the vertical face of the bunker, the ball falls rather than ricochets.
“It’s a new method, to say the least,” says Terry Kennelly, director of agronomy at Miakka with 40 years of industry experience at courses such as Inverness, Congressional, Concession and The Pelican on his résumé. “We’ve all seen that Australian look, but they’ve got the sand structure there that enables them do that. We don’t have that in America. That, and we’ve had almost 90 inches of rain here. They don’t get 90 inches in Australia.”
“It’s great to get a big project like Miakka,” Potter says. “(But) that’s only going to be one to five percent of the projects that we are going to do. The rest are going to be grass-covered steep faces, even straight faces. I see it helping the average Joe, the average golf course that comes back every year and keeps trying to find ways to grow grass on their bunkers and stabilizing those edges.”
A labor saver and morale booster
If there’s anything Kirk Gates hates, it’s fighting the same problem over and over again. His previous position as superintendent at Belle Meade CC in Nashville presented him with that scenario.
A path was cut across a fairway in a landing area. Not wanting the ball to carom out of bounds, mulch was chosen for that path instead of other materials.
The problem? After every storm, he wasted hours of labor to collect the mulch and make the path look presentable again.
“We spent hours upon hours of labor remulching that,” Gates says. “Finally, we installed Porous Pave; the ball doesn’t react to it like it does on concrete or asphalt. It still looks as good today as the day I put it on over five years ago.”
After 21 years at Belle Meade, Gates moved to a new club, Hillwood CC in Nashville three years ago. Like a dad who found a hundred different ways to put the same tool to good use, Gates found multiple applications for Porous Pave at Hillwood.
The club began a regrassing project last year to go from several varieties of bermudagrass to a monostand of TifTuf. While the course was closed for that project, Gates and his team tackled other projects, each utilizing Porous Pave. For example…
A dilapidated walking bridge was reconstructed out of pressed decking. Knowing the bridge would eventually become slick from algae growth, they applied Porous Pave like it was carpet. “This will give us firm footing for members for years to come,” Gates says. “It actually turned out really, really good.”
On areas where golfers commonly leave the cart path — curves, turns, etc. — Gates installed flat rocks and then coated them in Porous Pave to keep them stable. “Where you get one tire off the path, it creates a mud hole,” Gates says. “Now, when you go off the path, you feel that wrapped stone and get back on the path.”
A turnaround was installed on No. 16 for members, and a cut-through to the shop was removed for the crew. After three weeks, they realized how much they needed the cut-through for maintenance and to service the comfort stations. With an opportunity to bring it back new and fresh, they installed a Porous Pave trail.
Gates has also used the material around tee boxes where golfers walk through native areas. And after installing huge stones as steps on the driving range tee, he added Porous Pave to the areas between the steps. “I keep finding things to use it for — it’s a great product.”
Gates describes Porous Pave as a 50/50 mixture of crumb rubber and crushed granite. He either mixes it in a wheelbarrow or a mortar mixer. He says it’s similar to spreading concrete. Pro tip: He suggests applying cooking oil to your shovel or mortar mixer before you start working with the material.
Gates looks back at the first time he used the material at Belle Meade to solve his mulch mess and guesses it saved thousands in labor costs from his budget.
“It was in a natural runoff area, so when we’d get heavy rains, it would pick all that mulch up and just push it into a big ol’ pile on the cart path,” he says. “(Fixing the problem) was a morale booster, for sure.”
A bioengineered, living shoreline
Nate Watkin worked for 15 years in South Florida as an assistant superintendent and then a superintendent. He knows well the challenges of trying to manipulate the effects of Mother Nature to maximize golf course conditions.
In late 2020, he made a career change and joined SOX Erosion Solutions, first as a regional expert and now as the company’s global golf division manager.
“After installing four systems on the property I managed, I saw first hand the positive impact SOX had on our pond ecosystem,” Watkin says. “We planted littoral vegetation in front of the system and within six months, wildlife was thriving. The opportunity to align myself with an environmentally focused company that wanted to grow awareness in the golf industry was something I could not pass up.”
Watkin says much of what the company does is training on the installation of their system — to both contractors and superintendents — for courses that want to handle their erosion issues in-house. He describes the process as having five parts: installing anchors, then a rope system, then tethering the ropes to a high-density polyethylene mesh, importing fill or dredging in material, then vegetation can be placed on top of the system and will root through the mesh.
“When we tether it back, it looks kind of like a taco,” Watkin says. “Essentially, we’re halting erosion and stabilizing the environment, and you can grass right over it. We’re creating a bioengineered, living shoreline.”
Watkin says the advantages are numerous, including a safer golf course, stability, improved water quality and a more aesthetically pleasing shoreline.
“We’re turning water hazards into water features,” he says.
Joshua Fleisher, director of golf course maintenance at the 27-hole Addison Reserve CC in Delray Beach, Fla., recently underwent a $24 million renovation led by Rees Jones. It was completed in two phases — in 2023 and 2024 — and the installation of the SOX Erosion Solutions system was a small part of phase two.
“We had seen some major erosion on our lake banks,” Fleisher says. “We’re a direct-feed irrigation system. Basically, we feed no water into our lakes, but we pump from our lakes for all our common area irrigation.”
While Fleisher was happy with how the renovation was going, the lake banks frustrated him, calling them “an eyesore.” It was especially frustrating because the lake banks always looked worse in the winters — the dry season — when most members are at the club.
“The water level fluctuates up and down, up and down all year long,” Fleisher says. “Over the course of 25 years, we had some major erosion issues. We had done other erosion control measures before, but never one that had the versatility of SOX.”
The renovation of Addison Reserve was finished in November of last year, and Fleisher is thrilled with the results, including having his lake banks fixed. He is eyeing another area on the course where he plans to utilize SOX Erosion Solution.
“What I really loved about it is we have a couple areas that give us a really nice, big bull nose, kind of like an Augusta (National GC) lake bank, and then we have a couple areas that give us a really nice, subtle, gentle slope, four or five feet out,” Fleisher says. “It’s a solid product. We feel like our lake banks are going to be in really great shape for the next 10 to 15 years.”
Watkin adds that SOX Erosion Control’s versatility in how it can look is one of its key strengths for the golf market. If a course is 100 years old, it will still look 100 years old when the system is complete.
“We can stabilize any urban environment to any slope,” he says. “An older course doesn’t want straight, manicured lines. They want a natural look. We’re able to provide that and prevent erosion.”
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