Keeping up with the Jones: Great ideas from the Gaslamp
The vibe at the 2025 San Diego GCSAA Conference and Trade Show was ridiculously good. The trade show floor was packed on Wednesday. Thursday traffic died down in the afternoon, but that just meant less dodging of meandering people to get to where I was going.
After show hours, the Gaslamp Quarter was packed with GCSAA members. Any place you’d go, there was a great chance you’d see a familiar face. And the city was happy to have us there. As I handed over my credit card for one last round at Bub’s at the Ballpark before we jetted off to make our dinner reservation, the bartender looked at me and said, “I love this conference! You guys drink.”
Cheers to you, Mr. Bartender. I love this conference, too.
GCSAA reported that this was their best-attended show in three years. More than 11,000 attendees traveled to San Diego for the show — better numbers than they saw last year in Phoenix or two years ago in Orlando.
There were so many great ideas in one place, and we did our best to cover as much as possible. We have 20-plus videos from the show that we’ll be sharing on our YouTube channel and in our e-newsletter over the next several weeks. In those videos, we spotlight the new tools and technologies that stood out at the show. We’ll also share a lot of what we saw in the pages of the magazine — an instant example of that is in this issue, my feature, “Super Solutions”. Three different tools are profiled, and I’m guessing at least one will be new to you.
I saw perhaps the best idea of my 2025 San Diego GCSAA Conference and Trade Show trip before I even got to San Diego. I was seated at the Coors Silver Bullet Bar in Denver, awaiting my connection to San Diego, when I was slapped on the back and greeted with a “Rock chalk, Jayhawk!”
It was Dan Grogan, aka @PurdueTurfy on X, superintendent at the Sagamore Club in Noblesville, Ind., who was with a group of fellow superintendents awaiting the same flight. Dan showed me his plan for the GCSAA Trade Show: He looked at a map of the trade show floor and grouped the booths he wanted to visit by booth number, cutting down on wasted walking.
Why hadn’t I thought of this in my 25 years of attending the show?
To be fair, it would be hard for me to do it. My meetings and those of my team are scheduled with the company we’re visiting in advance. There’s very little spontaneity in my trade show days. But next year, I am going to try to suggest days/times based on booth location.
Another great idea was doing 19th Hole interviews in person after the show. I’m happy that my request for volunteers on X generated some interest, and I was able to sit down in person with three superintendents for interviews (all three guys I know — but never featured in 19th Hole). The first of those three interviews appears in this issue.
To round out our GCSAA Conference coverage, this issue’s Golfdom Gallery is all from San Diego. Scenes from the USS Midway, the Gaslamp and the Friends of Golfdom (FOG) party are included. The FOG party was a hit — management eventually warned us we needed to ask people to leave the upstairs of the Field because it was over the fire code capacity.
Looks like we’re going to need a bigger boat in Orlando next year.
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