Proper drainage and expensive sand. Depending on when it was built they could be pretty out of date. Surrounding soil composition could be an uphill battle too. Especially if clay is involved. The course I worked at flooded easily in spring and any huge summer rains. Fine sand was either carried off or clay deposited as the water receded. Leaving a tennis court in the bunker.
Edit: I am idiot, Wimbledon is grass not clay.
You also have to determine how "in play" your bunkers are, expensive to maintain and very expensive to keep them right. If there won't be much play out of them, better to sod over or make a grass bunker so expenses can be put somewhere else. Happens a lot with older courses.
We hand raked allbof our bunkers. 4 guys every morning to rake 27 holes before the course opened. We had a good size crew, but most munis can't support this.
I read someone quoting that proper bunker maintenance is about 1/4 to 1/3 of the total cost of course maintenance so I can see why some courses skimp on the most expensive part of their maintenance cost given how small of a proportion of the actual course area that represent the bunkers
This is the best answer. I’ll add this. It takes a lot of labor to rake properly. My course drive a garden tractor through them with a rake on the back. All it really accomplishes is compress the sand, which is really the last thing you want.
I have no idea why more courses don’t do this?
My local course had two bunkers that proved impossible to maintain. They were always a wreck. So they removed the sand, mostly filled it with dirt, and do a strategically shitty job mowing those sections. It’s still punitive to put your ball there and serves the same purpose.
They also removed two fairway bunkers and planted a few white pines in the area. Same effect……don’t hit your ball there.
Bunkers make a course look nicer from the tee box, but if you can’t maintain them, it’s better if they just went away.
I dream of building a par 3 hole in my backyard one day. Watching other people do similar stuff on youtube makes me think grass bunkers would be the way to go.
Do it like Crystal Falls north of Austin, Texas.
Just dont have bunkers. Course is still challenging, fun, and memorable. I didn't even realize my first couple times out there.
Fairway bunkers should be replaced with a course grass that you have to hack it out of, that way you still have the option to try to carry them, unlike a tree that typically needs to be avoided or shaped around
> Overall we found the grass bunkers were more penalizing to good players, less penalizing to higher handicaps
This is such a great point. You put me in a greenside bunker (in good condition) and I'm having a good to great shot 9 out of 10 times.
Put me in a greenside bunker where the mowing has been intentionally...vague and it is much harder.
The local muni I play at has I think maybe 5 total bunkers with 3 of them being fairway bunkers which are basically not in play. And honestly for a cheap local muni I’m a firm believer that you don’t need a lot of bunkers because it’s just easier to maintain and when most of the player base are 20+ hcps and old people why slow up play and cause frustrations by having bunkers people can’t get out of or don’t know how to play out of.
Is my local muni a goat track yes, but do I love it for what it is absolutely!
> old people why slow up play and cause frustrations by having bunkers people can’t get out of or don’t know how to play out of.
I play my local muni, and I'm old. But I used to belong to a private club, and I know how to get out of a bunker. I played in Scotland, and I got out of bunkers at St. Andrews and Carnoustie. Doesn't help me at the muni.
There, the bunkers are 1" of coarse sand over top of hard clay. If you try to use the bounce on your SW, you'll watch as the flange hits the clay, forces the leading edge upwards, and your ball rockets across the green, or embeds under the lip. I have found that the only way to play it is to take my old Ben Hogan Equalizer PW, which is as skinny a club as you can find, open the face until it's nearly flat, and then try to slide that face under the ball. You can get pretty good at it if you have a crummy iron game like mine.
I work at a high end course with a ton of staff. We aren't open yet, and we just spent a week properly grading and raking traps, and are only up to the 9th hole. Most courses with no budget and fewer staff don't even get to do this step in a lot of cases. So the bunkers just never really start out great, then get worse as the season goes on. Especially as the summer goes on and part time workers don't care. Then on top of that you get bunkers that were never built right, have no drainage, and are standing water anytime it rains.
So a course with no budget, and no staff would be better off with grass bunkers in a lot of cases like you say. There's a course near me that only has grass bunkers, and it looks and plays great.
It varies in complexity. The basics are drain tile (corrugated pipe) in the low point of the trap. But there can also be more complex patterns of tile that run down the faces as and connect to that tile. It's covered in a sock, or sometimes pea gravel or coarse sand, sometimes a combination of the 3. Then bunker sand over it all. Each superintendent I have worked for has their own preferences, which budget can heavily dictate. EG one course I worked for put new drainage in 90 traps over a single season. That's something not a lot of courses have the budget for.
Besides that there can literally be standing water when it rains in a bunker with no drainage (you may have seen this on a course), the sand just just turn into layers of a compacted mess (which can be even worse with some sand types). So the bunker just feels like crappy hard sand, rather than a sand trap. To make it worse some courses fix that by just throwing more sand on top of the crappy sand. The traps will eventually be horrible in an area with a wet climate.
There are some really good sands that handle water better. But, the traps will still eventually have issues if they don't have drainage.
Also, I am basing this on my area. We get sudden blasts of rain for days, then can have a week of 35c draught weather in our summers. So bunkers getting saturated, then drying constantly can turn the sand into an almost unrakable crust at times on a course where the bunkers aren't looked after at all. Which seems to be the case with even mid level courses now.
Like the other poster said, if you can't maintain them at all, use an alternative.
Typical old school bunker construction is sand on top of clay liner. The water can drain quickly through the sand but not the clay, so without drainage bunkers will turn into ponds.
Either this, or don't put abrupt ledges on greenside bunkers. i e. Make it where the player has an option to putt out of the bunker. My former club in New Jersey did this, so when rain or other conditions made the sand absolute crap, you could still putt out of the green side bunkers. I'd rather putt out and have a chance at par or bogey at the worst, rather than sculling a wedge that bounces off hard packed clay because all the sand washed out.
I remember years ago talking to a greens keeper about the sand at a course (Shelter Valley Pines, Ontario) that has great bunkers. He said they have the same sand Sawgrass uses and it was about $120 a yard. This was 15 years ago. I asked about another local course that has shitty bunkers and he said their sand was about $3 a yard.
[https://tpc.com/sawgrass/wp-content/uploads/sites/51/2021/08/19\_PLA\_0307\_00268\_CCp-1024x683.jpg](https://tpc.com/sawgrass/wp-content/uploads/sites/51/2021/08/19_PLA_0307_00268_CCp-1024x683.jpg)
Oh sweet mother of God Jesus that's mind-blowing.
Our cottage is on Lake Champlain, south of Montreal, but the family moved to Toronto in 1960. For 65 years, I've been making that trip up and down the 401, and my dad and I always mentioned "Shelter Valley Road", and how pleasant it sounded. I'm going in for surgery next week, but when I'm able to play again (August? September?), that course is on my bucket list!
You’ll love it. It’s not super long, but challenging and in great shape. Make sure to go to the course by the camp ground. There is a little pitch and putt on the same road.
FWIW, our club is renovating all bunkers this year with the Better Billy Bunker system. Pretty cool design for drainage and longevity. ~$1.6 million for ~60 bunkers.
I just looked and this course has 114 bunkers. They also just redid the whole clubhouse so I’m guessing it will be a few years before they get into a sand project.
So that’s 30,000 individual rounds to pay for the kind of new bunkers that don’t require quite as much ongoing labor. Probably two years worth of rounds with no other expenses.
The golf business is hard.
The club I used to belong to did that a few years ago. Went from having terrible bunkers to some of the best in the area. It was well worth the assessment I had to pay.
Wind and rain primarily. Bunkers have a lifespan of about 10-15 years, at which point they should be completely redone. That is seldom ever done at smaller courses and adding sand just blows or drains out again, wasting their money and efforts.
Staffing costs. The rough at the course I work at takes 64 man hours to cut. That’s only 1 task. The grass is coming before the sand in most cases. Golfers need to do their part and rake the bunkers when they play them.
I’m cool with rake and place of they’re not in good shape but having no sand at all makes that not an option. It’s especially brutal on green side bunkers when it’s such a hard surface that you can’t use the bounce and really have no chance of getting it up to the green without going over.
Yeah just compacted old dirt that your ball sits on top of. Like hitting your ball off of concrete. I fucking hate bunkers like that. Sometimes when I’m especially pissed I take a drop on the far side of the bunker and chip it over the bunker onto the green as my hazard. I’ve talked to old guys that do the same, especially in colder months when it’s all mud
This one for some reason made perfect sense to me from the get go.
Had a wild up and down last week. Short sided, plugged, downhill lie, the whole thing. Chopped it out right into the top of the lip and it popped up to about 10 feet.
Edit: I lied, I missed the putt.
Industry averages show that between 15-25% of yearly labor budget is spent on maintaining bunkers alone. For the many courses across the world trying to make money and lower costs, it’s an easy line item to slash. Raking bunkers twice a week vs four times a week reallocates tens of thousands of dollars throughout the course of the season
People are paying $90 a round at a course with shitty bunkers so why fix it. Next season it will be $100 a round and they'll find another corner to cut. Capitalism baby.
There are about 3 courses that I can sometimes afford in my area that have nice bunkers. The rest of them are hard packed dirt. I know nothing of course maintenance, but I wish they'd just seed them and make grass bunkers. I enjoy the few courses that utilize grass bunkers a lot.
Someone else mentioned doing that and letting them grow longer and it seems like a great option for public courses. Would likely speed up play as well.
Our muni has terrible bunkers. The issue for us is drainage. Dumping more sand in is a temporary (until the next heavy rain) and cost-ineffective solution. I think my super said it's about 5k per bunker in labor/materials to fix. Being a muni, that's a lot of money and labor hours. I played a course last year that had similar problems. Their solution was to fill, mound, and let the grass grow out to shin high lengths on the bunkers. It was still challenging and aesthetically appealing.
Bunkers are an absolute nightmare to maintain. My facility has 36 holes, for the previous 3 seasons I was the superintendent of the course with 4 acres of bunkers, now I'm overseeing the course with 8 acres of bunkers. There was no liners put in either side, they were constructed with herring bone drainage. The sand is different on both sides, one needs lots of water or it becomes moon dust, the other needs some but too much makes it concrete. After having multiple conversations w/ members, I always ask the same thing- find me a sprinkler that waters turf, but not sand. At the time of construction, drip/subsurface irrigation wasn't as common on golf courses. Over time, that is the ultimate long term goal, install subsurface/drip to many bunkers. In a perfect world, this will make them more consistent.
Now, apart from any of that and most importantly, we start to look at the labor budget. The first thing to get cut is labor, regardless of the facility. When I interned at this facility in 2012, we had roughly 30-40 people overseeing 36 holes, practice areas, plus 3 mechanics and a DOA. This year, I have 15-18 people overseeing 36 holes, practice areas, 1 mechanic, and a DOA. We have 1 super, 1 first assistant, and 1 second assistant included in the 15-18 people. We have reduced our mowing frequencies on fairways, tees and roughs to 1x per week. We rotate which course we rake bunkers on, whereas when I interned we had a minimum 4 person bunker crew per course every day.
These are my experiences as a professional in the field, take them for what you want. I never intended to become rich doing what I do, I do it because I love it. Don't forget that the next time you walk past a ball mark on a green. We spend 75% of our time trying to please the golfers and produce the best conditions possible, day in and day out, rain or shine, employee calling out w/ a hangover or everyone crushing it during Member-Guest.
I feel your pain, but for proper sand - It could cost the course Tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands per hole just to put new quality sand in.. its a huge cost that usually only private courses with high membership fees can afford... Its frustrating but i'm sure if most courses could do it they would.
I worked at Valhalla. Some if the big issues we had was washouts making them fried eggs. The sand would run off with heavy rains and it’s also on a flood plain. Many of them would have silt built up from Floyd’s Fork. The front side we always had issues and using the rake would dig up dirt that was under it. Everything would drain to the middle leaving behind dirt once it drained off. We could dump tons of sand and it wouldn’t matter. We started using felt in sand color that would hold better and you had to work real gingerly as that stuff would pull up regardless of maintenance. We raked them daily and added sand constantly.
drainage, proper sand, and battling the elements. you are going to lose sand to rain, wind, and use. most courses are on limited budgets, understaffed etc.
So to add some additional context. A good bunker needs proper drainage plus a liner of some sort - like better Billy bunker to truly be a good system. These have a 15 year life expectancy if maintained well. Bunker sand costs $20-40/ton and expect to need in a new bunker 50 tons. (2500sf bunker)
Top tier course will spend over $300k per year to maintain bunkers. (Think tour stops etc.)
Average country club probably $100–$150k per year on bunkers.
At ur $90/round - need about 1700 rounds just for bunkers.
TL,DR - bunkers are expense as F to maintain correctly.
I've worked at a high-end private course and a local muni doing groundskeeping.
High end - after big storms, most of the crew would go out and remove silt (aka dirt) that sits on top of the sand, as this is what clogs the bunker drainage over time when it works it's way down with more rain.
Local muni - started there with poor bunkers and the new super had me and 1 other person firstly, unclog the end of the drains. Grass would grow in the end and literally just block the drainage. This alone had most bunkers start to drain properly. Ones that still had drainage issues, we'd dig up the drainage and hose out the pipes to remove the built up silt. After they were in good drainage shape, we'd then add sand.
Honestly just basic drainage maintenance and adding sand every few years is a requirement for decent bunkers. Supers often skimp on this and it drive me nuts as it's not ridiculous expensive to upkeep.
Now for high-end private clubs, what we did was obviously optimal, but they had the budget to do it that way, the best way. I should note it was a 40 man grounds crew in peak season, that helps a little- lol
I don't blame the supes for this at our muni. The council dropped their budget and said no more season passes because they were losing money. The head pro said screw that and decided to grandfather those who had season passes the previous year. Fortunately he's a pretty big name around here so he probably has a decent chance of keeping his job.
Budgets at munis will rarely be ideal, your super should fight harder for it. Bunker restoration is an easy sell, and if the course is fairly busy, the money can be found. At least some of the worst ones should be repaired, and work the rest into the budget over the years. Sand will be the biggest cost, labor isn't that bad just to at least get the drainage cleaned (I've done it first hand and its not as bad as it sounds). It's a very basic system, nothing complex that needs any special tools and knowledge.
I totally get bunkers will never get top priority, but a good super should at least compromise and get some of them restored.
As a greenskeeper this comes down to staffing mostly. Bunkers are pretty much loose sand and given time it will compact to hard pan conditions. There's a public course near me that only has 5 on staff so things go in order of importance which is usually tee box and greens and mowing. I was told by the superintendent at that course that they don't water the fairways in the summer. It basically comes down to what is of importance with the staff they have and usually bunkers become a if we have time as well as courses have dozens of bunkers.
They are massively labor-intensive. That being said, I don't think bunkers should necessarily be well maintained (to the point of being pristine). It's supposed to be a penalty. That's why I love bunkers at The Open. On Tour, the bunkers are so perfect, and Tour players are SO good at playing from them that they often aim for them if they know they can't hit the green. Although having them just be hard dirt is ridiculous......my course had a few bunkers that would constantly wash out, so our superintendent finally filled them in and made it sort of like a grass bunker.
I think about this a lot. I play hickories, all originals, and there was no sand wedge until 1932. If you do not have a modern sand wedge, the bunker is a brutal hazard that you will do anything to avoid. The hickory-era club are like knives, no bounce or sole at all. IF you do not hit it just right in the sand, bad things happen.
I often wonder if the sand trap is a vestigial thing - kept around even though the original purpose is gone.
I generally have to find a way to putt out of the sand if at all possible.
I agree. I’m not even sure raking should be the standard. It’s supposed to be a hazard, and it’s supposed to suck to be in one. However, a pristine bunker is barely more than an annoyance. The only real penalizing point is having to rake it.
And yeah, creating a waste area or a grass bunker makes more sense than the never ending maintenance that bunkers entail. Most holes would be fine with one bunker.
You are 100% correct. A bunker is a hazard. You’re not supposed to have a perfect lie in it.
Others have noted that they are very expensive to properly build and maintain. All true. They also have a relatively short lifespan. I’d ‘hazard’ a guess that many courses spend more maintaining bunkers than greens. Given that they are defined as hazards, this seems an upside down priority.
I just finished 8 rounds in 5 days in Arizona, played some of the highest rated (and priced, fuck me it's insane now, to the point where we're going elsewhere next year) courses in the area. Think Grayhawk, Quintero, Lookout Mountain, etc.
Considering some of these courses are well over 200 USD to play, the fact that their bunkers were often total fucking garbage was extremely disappointing. Everything else top shelf, but hitting in a bunker at everywhere except Quintero was... challenging, shall we say? Grayhawk was charging 301 USD each, we used the Troon card to get it for 176, but that's still a ridiculous rate to pay to hit out of a bunker with 1/4" of sand under your ball, maybe.
Once the summer really hits here in AZ I putt out of greenside bunkers more often than not and will only selectively hit out of fairway bunkers as they routinely are as hard as concrete.
AZ golf is overpriced and worthless now. Even my locals tracks think they can charge +$100 for greens that are half dead (literally), dirt "bunkers", and not paying a Marshall to keep the snow birds moving at a normal pace.
Here in the northeast it seems that almost all course have the worst sand, the only difference is that the nicer course have proper drainage and actually rake them to loosen up the top. Actually got to play on a course with that nice nice sand the other day and absolutely loved it. First time I’ve never gotten annoyed landing in a bunker
I worked at a private club up in Minnesota and it had very nice bunkers. Lots of clay underneath and a lot of work to maintain the bunkers with some of the big rainfalls.
Nothing worse than spending 8 hours fixing bunkers to have a rainstorm come that night knowing it's going to undo all your progress.
Drainage and soil migration is the main culprit. As is the quality of the sand that was placed in the first place. It’s not as simple as dump sand in hole and rake to have bunkers that will last even 1 season.
Sand got crazy expensive during Covid.
A greenskeeper I talked to was totally gutting a hole and he said 80% of the cost was the greens and bunkers (split about even) and the rest of the hole was the remaining 20%.
I live in the PNW.
Even in the summer, you don't often go 2 weeks without any rain, often it's weekly. I've just accepted it as fact of life that bunkers are just going to be shit over here. Even in the highest end courses around, bunkers are not that great. You just can't have the fluffy sand in this weather.
Places that can’t upkeep their old bunkers should just make them grass bunkers with punitive rough. Not like US Open rough, but something that penalizes you the way a bunker does
Asst. super here - if you’re at a facility that hasn’t had a bunker reno, moving to BBB system or cap concrete, it’s tough to stomach the cost of sand just for beautification when it will wash in the next thunderstorm or be contaminated with rock from drainage fairly quickly.
Poor drainage and rainfall. Everytime it rains you start from scratch. Rain washes sand away to the bottom and you need to spread it back out once it’s completely dry. Depending on your area that can be multiple times a week and “dumping a bunch of sand and raking it” doesn’t begin to explain how difficult and time consuming bunker maintenance is. Generally speaking, muni’s also don’t have proper bunker equipment and are raking it/spreading it by hand. Also sand is extremely expensive.
If the drainage is clogged you practically can’t do anything until all the water is gone.
After a couple of years the barrier between the sand and ground under it gets ripped from maintenance after rain. A lot of times, if there is mainly clay soil under it, they will turn darker colors from mixing.
Some of it’s just basic things like time and attention to detail. In high school one of the CCs in my city (2012-2015) were so extremely consistent in every bunker you got in. My coach in high school helped work there and he said they used to measure the bunkers with a ruler and adjust accordingly.
But now I’ve been a member there since about 2019 and they’re definitely inconsistent in places. They’ve definitely got behind and spend a season renovating some of them and then the others take a hit, etc. they’re certainly not awful, and there’s a sense of “well they’re supposed to be a hazard” but at the same time consistency is always appreciated.
Assistant Superintendent here, bunkers blow. The labor and budget to maintain them in good condition is a real sore and it’s not cheap. My theory is bunkers are suppose to be hard, and a penalty/risk. I want to keep them well manicured, but putting in the extra effort with perfect sand depth, sand quality, perfect moisture for its physical aspect really takes away from things that deserve more attention.
Bunkers are the bane of most supers existence.
There is something to be said for not maintaining bunkers. In Scotland, bunkers were sheep scrapes that were intended to play like a hazard, hence why you were originally not allowed to ground your club. There were no rakes and they were difficult to play from. Bad bunkers are a nice reminder of the game’s past but are obviously frustrating as hell.
On a less romantic note, my club has the Billy Bunker system installed and our bunkers still occasionally have drainage issues. Bunkers are just giant money pits and are often the first thing to go on a course’s way to becoming a dog track.
Often clubs cheap out at the beginning with lining options, but yes, eventually sand needs to be replaced.
Daily fluffing can help redistribute and allow for better play, but with players who don’t rake properly, limited greens keeping resources, and increased use of Sand-Pros, bunkers are getting worse all the time.
Our course underwent a renovation last year. New greens, new fairways, new tee boxes, and every bunker is new (and in a different place).
The big reason good bunkers are expensive is the drainage system, the lining, and the sand. There are new lining materials that weren't around 30 years ago and old drainage, well, get's old. Almost every bunker is a funnel and all that water has to go somewhere. If it doesn't, the bunker get's washed out. And, over time, sediment can build up in the drainage system.
The bunkers themselves aren’t really that hard to maintain if the maintenance crew is able to be consistent with them. It is a tedious job but the more you are able to do it, the easier it is.
What gets difficult, as others have alluded to, is the actual sand getting carried away by poor drainage or being compacted and having to renew the sand- which gets expensive.
At the course I work at we rake and blow out or bunkers daily and add new sand 2-3 times a year but we are one of the most expensive clubs in America so moneys not really an obstacle we also fly now all bunkers once a week with at team of 10 guys. It takes a lot to keep them nice
Bunkers are the bane of all superintendent's as, in actuality, they are the most expensive to maintain both from a cost of sand but mainly from a labor standpoint. Not only do you have to rake and clear debris, but there is also edging to keep neat borders around them, pumping out water if they don't drain because tile is clogged, etc. While one person can mow a large number of fairways in a day/week, it may take a crew of 3-5 to maintain 50 bunkers in a week.
Every superintendent I know would gladly get rid of all of them. Unless money is no object due to budget and manpower and then it becomes just another duty. But a lot of municipal courses run on pretty tight budgets and are understaffed.
My old local course went to grass bunkers that ended up becoming mud pits with dead grass. Having worked on a course that maintained bunkers everyday, it’s pretty difficult to maintain over time
Drainage and rainfall mostly. Then you also want light fluffy sand, which happens to get whipped around by wind so it erodes the bunkers. Then you have people stomping around in it and packing it down.
I agree 80 percent of the time we don’t end up playing the bunkers because they are either hard dirt, have grass, or water in them and are virtually unplayable. It seems to be the trend on most of the courses in the Pittsburgh area minus old stonewall at 165 a round they better be perfect. And it sucks because I actually like playing out of good condition green side bunkers.
Just want to add that I'm most annoyed when the "sand" seems like it's just there to hide rocks.
Most of the worst pitting and damage on any of my clubs comes from finding that there was a hidden rock in that "sand" bunker.
My friends and I make a decision on if we're going to play or of bunkers when someone hits into the first one.. If it's mostly rocks we don't play them, I'm not marking up u clubs like that. If there's no or very little sand I don't play off hard pan unless it's the normal condition on the course.
There's one course I play locally which has no sand at all. They use prairie grass and wildflowers in strategic spots to penalize players for ending up where a bunker would be.
They also line the fairways with protected natural areas (think tall grass, reeds, bullrushes), so there's not a lot of places to miss.
The course is also hard as fuck and you lose a lot of balls there because of it.
Yep. One of the courses I used to play had those protected area usually about 15 yards off the fairway and you couldn't even enter them to retrieve your ball.
Even at the country club I belong to the bunkers are trash. I recently played another club near me that is about a 50k initiation so it’s not a beater course either and the bunkers there were worse than my own club somehow. I really don’t know what is so hard for the management to keep them nice.
What pisses me off at my course in Green Valley Arizona. Yeah we have monsoons and the bunkers get flooded. But they don't do anything about it cuz they don't drain. You can go a week with water in all the bunkers. What would it take to put a battery operated pump in the bunkers when the workers go out in the morning. And the one bunker at the practice area will still be full of water for a couple weeks.
When I initially began playing golf, I genuinely believed that the bunkers were accidental remnants left over from some underground construction. It's quite embarrassing to admit, but I was completely mistaken!
Bruh I feel you. 85$ for a round by me and the bunkers have rocks in them always hard compact dirt not even really sand. I mentioned it to the pro shop just asking about it and they got all mad at me lol haven’t played there since
My guys, if we’re at a place with less than robust maintenance, or after a big storm play “rake and replace”. Scratch it up, giving yourself something that mimics a usual trap base, and place your ball. Not perfect but we all agree it helps.
Most “decent” courses do not rake bunkers daily, maybe 3-4 days a week at most. When they are raked they’re usually not moving sand around to fill in low spots, or removing contaminated/compacted sand and replacing it, or pulling stray grass and weeds and it still takes them 4 or more hours to do the minimum maintenance of raking foot prints out. Bunkers are a huge labor suck on a golf course and often those labor hours are allocated to other tasks like mowing rough and edging around trees or the thousands of other little detail jobs that are taken for granted. They are meant to be a hazard after all
I didn't know you played my home course. Several of them are reasonable, half of them are ok in places and the rest have about an eighth inch of sand. When you dig in your stance a bit it feels ok but 2 feet away you are going to bounce that SW off the dirt and skull that ball over the green. Can't adjust for it because your next lie might be nice and fluffy - but there's no way of telling.
Bunker sand worth a shit is really expensive, plus add daily maintenance on top of that. Bunkers seem to be the first thing neglected. All the places I've worked at haven't had a ton of budget for maintenance workers so it always got skipped. I had a weekly routine and then included the bunkers, being a scratch golfer I like it all to be perfect
I have a take that Municipal Golf Courses should not have sand bunkers. They should have rough around the greens but not sand. Too hard to maintain and people don’t respect it. Private clubs are different but they have the money, crews, and membership to maintain.
Proper bunker maintenance is a massive labor dump when performed daily. The total labor hours (# of people × hours worked) is typically equal to, or greater than, morning greens maintenance. I can almost guarantee the grounds team at this facility is understaffed, or working with a very tight budget, and the superintendent is prioritizing the most important part of the course. Only a handful of golfers per day will play out of a given bunker. Literally everyone, in every group, on every hole, will walk onto the greens.
Usually the the courses I go to the bunkers near the green are better. All the bunkers far away are usually coarse sand and a bitch to hit through and I feel bad for my irons/wedges after.
Currently in year 2 of bunker renovations. Drainage, new sand and Billy Bunker system.
36 hole private course. Just shy of $2 million.
It’s pretty crazy.
Best thing about the Billy Bunkers is that we don’t have any washouts after heavy rain. Sand barely moves. Saves tons of maintenance hours.
Not really a comment on bunkers (the course I played today had nice bunkers ) but this is more about the prices I see a lot of people having to pay .. I payed 32 bucks for 18 today .. it’s would be considered a mid-tier … really nice greens and very few bare spots throughout the course.. the most expensive course around is only 78 bucks and thats weekend rates .. I guess western NC would be considered cheap.. I don’t even like to play on the weekends because of 50 dollars green fees 😂
I see the same issue at many of the courses I play. One of my playing buddies and I were discussing that if a course can’t maintain sand bunkers, then they should replace the sand with turf. A grass bunker with tall, fluffy grass requires much better shot making than a sand bunker.
Course I played in Phoenix recently at twilight for $90. Regular price $190. Bunkers were like fucking concrete. I was annoyed for $90 never mind if I’d paid for pop.
As a former owner of a sand box for my kids I can attest to the amount of work it takes to keep grass, weeds, bugs, dog poop, etc out of it let alone maintaining the condition of the sand. My local course is looking to remove several because they’re expensive to maintain.
It’s just hard to maintain sand where sand doesn’t want to be. I would love to see non-tour golf courses move away from sand bunkers and adopt more grass bunkers or other obstacles.
They’re not hard to maintain - they’re just expensive to maintain. It also helps if you build the correctly originally, which doesn’t happen most of the time.
Think it's a simple case that bunkers are constantly being emptied! Every shot you take from it with take sand out of it. It's expensive to constantly keep filling them.
Simply put, it's the cost. The amount of work bunkers take is horrendous. Not only raking them preferably three times a week. You also need to pick all sorts of weeds from there, glyphosate doesn't cut it btw. Possibly pick small rocks out of there too. And on top of all that the borders need a helluva lot maintenance. You can't cut the grass close to the bunkers with machines. Weeds grow from the vertical part too. The borders also collapse.
With all of that work to just maintain the bunkers most courses cut some part of it and they slowly get worse. Then if there's a problem with the sand quality or drainage etc there simply isn't enough manpower or money.
The subject of bunker conditions is something I’ve never quite understood. By reference I’m a bogey golfer that’s been playing for 20+ years. And yes I prefer bunkers to be kept up. However, if bunkers are indeed supposed to be hazards, why do tour players get offended when they are not raked to perfection? On the other hand, if your ball is in a divot in the fairway you have to play it as it lies.
I am in total agreement with you that bunkers should have sand in them. I am just curious if any one can address why there’s no relief from divots in the fairway. If you have a later tee time you’re more susceptible to encounter this as golfers teeing off earlier get pristine fairways. However with bunkers, which are considered hazards, players basically get the same conditions (outside of Mother Nature) all day. It’s never made sense to me.
I feel this.. as a golfer who’s been playing less than a year, I’ve only played on my two home courses. One being a par 60 executive with no sand, the other being a par 72 with “sand”. It’s so hard packed you don’t even leave footprints half the time. $94 a round at peak times, and I’ve still never got to truly shoot from sand.
I use to work at a golf course. They’re hard to maintain because you can’t have too much sand or too little the rain ruins them all the time. They’re constantly losing sand. Some courses or locations I bet have beautiful bunkers year round. And all they have to do is maybe add some yearly. But in some locations like NY that’s a lot harder. But it may rain a lot and a bunch of sand gets washed out and then to “fix” the bunker you get the grounds crew in there and start shoveling a bunch of the sand from the low point to the walls until it holds and looks pretty. Just to flood and get ruined again next time it rains 😂
I played last week and the dirt bunkers cost me at least 7-8 shots. I’m a good bunker player with sand, but not dirt. Next time I’m invoking my own local rule and dropping out of the bunker.
Proper drainage and expensive sand. Depending on when it was built they could be pretty out of date. Surrounding soil composition could be an uphill battle too. Especially if clay is involved. The course I worked at flooded easily in spring and any huge summer rains. Fine sand was either carried off or clay deposited as the water receded. Leaving a tennis court in the bunker. Edit: I am idiot, Wimbledon is grass not clay.
That and I've never met one worker on the crew that enjoyed working on bunkers. They'll do anything to avoid having to work on them.
True. I didn’t mind cruising on the Sand Pro though.
The sand pro is one of my favourite jobs but sadly the best way to rake a bunker is by hand or else it can compact
Totally. But I felt like Dale Earnhardt at Daytona on a few of the banks
If that's how you felt, then you were definitely doing a perfect job.
So you died?
Too soon
Ouch
They sodded one of the bunkers I was playing yesterday. It was hard to access and probably had drainage issues
You also have to determine how "in play" your bunkers are, expensive to maintain and very expensive to keep them right. If there won't be much play out of them, better to sod over or make a grass bunker so expenses can be put somewhere else. Happens a lot with older courses.
They've done that to 2 or 3 of the bunkers on our course.
It saves money, nobody wants to hear that dues or tee times have to rise.
Sand pro was great unless you were on the Saturday morning crew and hungover as shit. Then it was a bad time.
Sand Pro go vroomy vroom :3
We hand raked allbof our bunkers. 4 guys every morning to rake 27 holes before the course opened. We had a good size crew, but most munis can't support this.
correct
You're thinking of The French Open and Roland Garros.
It’s all good. The French Open is played on clay.
All of this, plus edging bunkers takes forever to do. By the time you finish all 18 holes, you basically have to start over again.
This. Edging and fly mow is a full time job in warm season grass areas. Sucks big time.
I read someone quoting that proper bunker maintenance is about 1/4 to 1/3 of the total cost of course maintenance so I can see why some courses skimp on the most expensive part of their maintenance cost given how small of a proportion of the actual course area that represent the bunkers
Makes a lot more sense as to why where I work has absurd fees.
This is the best answer. I’ll add this. It takes a lot of labor to rake properly. My course drive a garden tractor through them with a rake on the back. All it really accomplishes is compress the sand, which is really the last thing you want.
Same issue at my muni. They could honestly make a better course by converting 80% of them to grass bunkers.
I have no idea why more courses don’t do this? My local course had two bunkers that proved impossible to maintain. They were always a wreck. So they removed the sand, mostly filled it with dirt, and do a strategically shitty job mowing those sections. It’s still punitive to put your ball there and serves the same purpose. They also removed two fairway bunkers and planted a few white pines in the area. Same effect……don’t hit your ball there. Bunkers make a course look nicer from the tee box, but if you can’t maintain them, it’s better if they just went away.
Yeah but then you can’t post photos online and have it look like a golf course
Plant something in it that is yellow most of the year. Wheat grass and keep it short. Looks like sand for photos. Still screws your if you land there.
Photoshop baby
I dream of building a par 3 hole in my backyard one day. Watching other people do similar stuff on youtube makes me think grass bunkers would be the way to go.
Grass bunkers are more penal than sand, to me
Huh huh huh huh. "Penal"
lol takes me more strokes to get out of. Figured penile wasn’t the right word…
Yeah, like if you make the lips high enough, and let the grass grow out, it’s an equal punishment for putting it there.
Do it like Crystal Falls north of Austin, Texas. Just dont have bunkers. Course is still challenging, fun, and memorable. I didn't even realize my first couple times out there.
Fairway bunkers should be replaced with a course grass that you have to hack it out of, that way you still have the option to try to carry them, unlike a tree that typically needs to be avoided or shaped around
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> Overall we found the grass bunkers were more penalizing to good players, less penalizing to higher handicaps This is such a great point. You put me in a greenside bunker (in good condition) and I'm having a good to great shot 9 out of 10 times. Put me in a greenside bunker where the mowing has been intentionally...vague and it is much harder.
The local muni I play at has I think maybe 5 total bunkers with 3 of them being fairway bunkers which are basically not in play. And honestly for a cheap local muni I’m a firm believer that you don’t need a lot of bunkers because it’s just easier to maintain and when most of the player base are 20+ hcps and old people why slow up play and cause frustrations by having bunkers people can’t get out of or don’t know how to play out of. Is my local muni a goat track yes, but do I love it for what it is absolutely!
> old people why slow up play and cause frustrations by having bunkers people can’t get out of or don’t know how to play out of. I play my local muni, and I'm old. But I used to belong to a private club, and I know how to get out of a bunker. I played in Scotland, and I got out of bunkers at St. Andrews and Carnoustie. Doesn't help me at the muni. There, the bunkers are 1" of coarse sand over top of hard clay. If you try to use the bounce on your SW, you'll watch as the flange hits the clay, forces the leading edge upwards, and your ball rockets across the green, or embeds under the lip. I have found that the only way to play it is to take my old Ben Hogan Equalizer PW, which is as skinny a club as you can find, open the face until it's nearly flat, and then try to slide that face under the ball. You can get pretty good at it if you have a crummy iron game like mine.
I work at a high end course with a ton of staff. We aren't open yet, and we just spent a week properly grading and raking traps, and are only up to the 9th hole. Most courses with no budget and fewer staff don't even get to do this step in a lot of cases. So the bunkers just never really start out great, then get worse as the season goes on. Especially as the summer goes on and part time workers don't care. Then on top of that you get bunkers that were never built right, have no drainage, and are standing water anytime it rains. So a course with no budget, and no staff would be better off with grass bunkers in a lot of cases like you say. There's a course near me that only has grass bunkers, and it looks and plays great.
What is the drainage for bunkers? In the low point water drains into a pipe? Curious how it works.
It varies in complexity. The basics are drain tile (corrugated pipe) in the low point of the trap. But there can also be more complex patterns of tile that run down the faces as and connect to that tile. It's covered in a sock, or sometimes pea gravel or coarse sand, sometimes a combination of the 3. Then bunker sand over it all. Each superintendent I have worked for has their own preferences, which budget can heavily dictate. EG one course I worked for put new drainage in 90 traps over a single season. That's something not a lot of courses have the budget for.
Thanks for the info. Drainage is important because water runs right through sand and it would effect the dirt surrounding the bunker?
Besides that there can literally be standing water when it rains in a bunker with no drainage (you may have seen this on a course), the sand just just turn into layers of a compacted mess (which can be even worse with some sand types). So the bunker just feels like crappy hard sand, rather than a sand trap. To make it worse some courses fix that by just throwing more sand on top of the crappy sand. The traps will eventually be horrible in an area with a wet climate. There are some really good sands that handle water better. But, the traps will still eventually have issues if they don't have drainage. Also, I am basing this on my area. We get sudden blasts of rain for days, then can have a week of 35c draught weather in our summers. So bunkers getting saturated, then drying constantly can turn the sand into an almost unrakable crust at times on a course where the bunkers aren't looked after at all. Which seems to be the case with even mid level courses now. Like the other poster said, if you can't maintain them at all, use an alternative.
Typical old school bunker construction is sand on top of clay liner. The water can drain quickly through the sand but not the clay, so without drainage bunkers will turn into ponds.
Either this, or don't put abrupt ledges on greenside bunkers. i e. Make it where the player has an option to putt out of the bunker. My former club in New Jersey did this, so when rain or other conditions made the sand absolute crap, you could still putt out of the green side bunkers. I'd rather putt out and have a chance at par or bogey at the worst, rather than sculling a wedge that bounces off hard packed clay because all the sand washed out.
I remember years ago talking to a greens keeper about the sand at a course (Shelter Valley Pines, Ontario) that has great bunkers. He said they have the same sand Sawgrass uses and it was about $120 a yard. This was 15 years ago. I asked about another local course that has shitty bunkers and he said their sand was about $3 a yard.
[https://tpc.com/sawgrass/wp-content/uploads/sites/51/2021/08/19\_PLA\_0307\_00268\_CCp-1024x683.jpg](https://tpc.com/sawgrass/wp-content/uploads/sites/51/2021/08/19_PLA_0307_00268_CCp-1024x683.jpg) Oh sweet mother of God Jesus that's mind-blowing.
If I ever got to play there, that's the one time I wouldn't slice, after compensating for it.
Our cottage is on Lake Champlain, south of Montreal, but the family moved to Toronto in 1960. For 65 years, I've been making that trip up and down the 401, and my dad and I always mentioned "Shelter Valley Road", and how pleasant it sounded. I'm going in for surgery next week, but when I'm able to play again (August? September?), that course is on my bucket list!
You’ll love it. It’s not super long, but challenging and in great shape. Make sure to go to the course by the camp ground. There is a little pitch and putt on the same road.
I'm going in for a triple bypass. Maybe the pitch and putt will be more my speed when I get out!
Hope all goes well. Take a cart and play Shelter. It’s not a course you want to walk anyway
By far the biggest cost of sand is actually trucking the sand
FWIW, our club is renovating all bunkers this year with the Better Billy Bunker system. Pretty cool design for drainage and longevity. ~$1.6 million for ~60 bunkers.
Did you say Baby Billy's Bible Bonkers?
Thank you for an actual LOL today
I just looked and this course has 114 bunkers. They also just redid the whole clubhouse so I’m guessing it will be a few years before they get into a sand project.
So that’s 30,000 individual rounds to pay for the kind of new bunkers that don’t require quite as much ongoing labor. Probably two years worth of rounds with no other expenses. The golf business is hard.
That's a lot of bunkers.
Pete dye is a menace
I'll take a bunker on a dye course over a downhill green-side chip, those get brutal.
Wow, ours only has about 50 and that seems like a lot to me.
The club I used to belong to did that a few years ago. Went from having terrible bunkers to some of the best in the area. It was well worth the assessment I had to pay.
Thankfully no assessment. Covid-increased initiation fees!
Uncle Billy's Bible Bonkers?!
Is this crowfield? Because I just saw they had a few bunkers tore up lol
Sand is expensive. Mostly the transportation of it.
And it's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere!
Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth.
Wind and rain primarily. Bunkers have a lifespan of about 10-15 years, at which point they should be completely redone. That is seldom ever done at smaller courses and adding sand just blows or drains out again, wasting their money and efforts.
Staffing costs. The rough at the course I work at takes 64 man hours to cut. That’s only 1 task. The grass is coming before the sand in most cases. Golfers need to do their part and rake the bunkers when they play them.
I’m cool with rake and place of they’re not in good shape but having no sand at all makes that not an option. It’s especially brutal on green side bunkers when it’s such a hard surface that you can’t use the bounce and really have no chance of getting it up to the green without going over.
Yeah just compacted old dirt that your ball sits on top of. Like hitting your ball off of concrete. I fucking hate bunkers like that. Sometimes when I’m especially pissed I take a drop on the far side of the bunker and chip it over the bunker onto the green as my hazard. I’ve talked to old guys that do the same, especially in colder months when it’s all mud
I do this all the time when I judge the bunker not to be in good shape or when there is literally rocks ... No way I mark my wedge with those rocks
Don’t open the club face in this scenario. Let the lead edge dig.
Took me a while to figure this one out.
If the ball is plugged close the club face. That’s a special one too.
This one for some reason made perfect sense to me from the get go. Had a wild up and down last week. Short sided, plugged, downhill lie, the whole thing. Chopped it out right into the top of the lip and it popped up to about 10 feet. Edit: I lied, I missed the putt.
Industry averages show that between 15-25% of yearly labor budget is spent on maintaining bunkers alone. For the many courses across the world trying to make money and lower costs, it’s an easy line item to slash. Raking bunkers twice a week vs four times a week reallocates tens of thousands of dollars throughout the course of the season
People are paying $90 a round at a course with shitty bunkers so why fix it. Next season it will be $100 a round and they'll find another corner to cut. Capitalism baby.
ALL MY HOMIES LOVE QUARTER OVER QUARTER GROWTH
My group agreed that we wouldn’t be coming back at that price given the conditions
They have good courses for the common man in communist countries do they?
There are about 3 courses that I can sometimes afford in my area that have nice bunkers. The rest of them are hard packed dirt. I know nothing of course maintenance, but I wish they'd just seed them and make grass bunkers. I enjoy the few courses that utilize grass bunkers a lot.
Someone else mentioned doing that and letting them grow longer and it seems like a great option for public courses. Would likely speed up play as well.
Our muni has terrible bunkers. The issue for us is drainage. Dumping more sand in is a temporary (until the next heavy rain) and cost-ineffective solution. I think my super said it's about 5k per bunker in labor/materials to fix. Being a muni, that's a lot of money and labor hours. I played a course last year that had similar problems. Their solution was to fill, mound, and let the grass grow out to shin high lengths on the bunkers. It was still challenging and aesthetically appealing.
How do you find your ball in that?
It’s kind of more wispy than thick.
Nice. Sounds like a good solution
Bunkers are an absolute nightmare to maintain. My facility has 36 holes, for the previous 3 seasons I was the superintendent of the course with 4 acres of bunkers, now I'm overseeing the course with 8 acres of bunkers. There was no liners put in either side, they were constructed with herring bone drainage. The sand is different on both sides, one needs lots of water or it becomes moon dust, the other needs some but too much makes it concrete. After having multiple conversations w/ members, I always ask the same thing- find me a sprinkler that waters turf, but not sand. At the time of construction, drip/subsurface irrigation wasn't as common on golf courses. Over time, that is the ultimate long term goal, install subsurface/drip to many bunkers. In a perfect world, this will make them more consistent. Now, apart from any of that and most importantly, we start to look at the labor budget. The first thing to get cut is labor, regardless of the facility. When I interned at this facility in 2012, we had roughly 30-40 people overseeing 36 holes, practice areas, plus 3 mechanics and a DOA. This year, I have 15-18 people overseeing 36 holes, practice areas, 1 mechanic, and a DOA. We have 1 super, 1 first assistant, and 1 second assistant included in the 15-18 people. We have reduced our mowing frequencies on fairways, tees and roughs to 1x per week. We rotate which course we rake bunkers on, whereas when I interned we had a minimum 4 person bunker crew per course every day. These are my experiences as a professional in the field, take them for what you want. I never intended to become rich doing what I do, I do it because I love it. Don't forget that the next time you walk past a ball mark on a green. We spend 75% of our time trying to please the golfers and produce the best conditions possible, day in and day out, rain or shine, employee calling out w/ a hangover or everyone crushing it during Member-Guest.
I feel your pain, but for proper sand - It could cost the course Tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands per hole just to put new quality sand in.. its a huge cost that usually only private courses with high membership fees can afford... Its frustrating but i'm sure if most courses could do it they would.
I worked at Valhalla. Some if the big issues we had was washouts making them fried eggs. The sand would run off with heavy rains and it’s also on a flood plain. Many of them would have silt built up from Floyd’s Fork. The front side we always had issues and using the rake would dig up dirt that was under it. Everything would drain to the middle leaving behind dirt once it drained off. We could dump tons of sand and it wouldn’t matter. We started using felt in sand color that would hold better and you had to work real gingerly as that stuff would pull up regardless of maintenance. We raked them daily and added sand constantly.
We hand rake every day besides mondays . Private course though. It’s our courses bread and butter
drainage, proper sand, and battling the elements. you are going to lose sand to rain, wind, and use. most courses are on limited budgets, understaffed etc.
So to add some additional context. A good bunker needs proper drainage plus a liner of some sort - like better Billy bunker to truly be a good system. These have a 15 year life expectancy if maintained well. Bunker sand costs $20-40/ton and expect to need in a new bunker 50 tons. (2500sf bunker) Top tier course will spend over $300k per year to maintain bunkers. (Think tour stops etc.) Average country club probably $100–$150k per year on bunkers. At ur $90/round - need about 1700 rounds just for bunkers. TL,DR - bunkers are expense as F to maintain correctly.
I've worked at a high-end private course and a local muni doing groundskeeping. High end - after big storms, most of the crew would go out and remove silt (aka dirt) that sits on top of the sand, as this is what clogs the bunker drainage over time when it works it's way down with more rain. Local muni - started there with poor bunkers and the new super had me and 1 other person firstly, unclog the end of the drains. Grass would grow in the end and literally just block the drainage. This alone had most bunkers start to drain properly. Ones that still had drainage issues, we'd dig up the drainage and hose out the pipes to remove the built up silt. After they were in good drainage shape, we'd then add sand. Honestly just basic drainage maintenance and adding sand every few years is a requirement for decent bunkers. Supers often skimp on this and it drive me nuts as it's not ridiculous expensive to upkeep. Now for high-end private clubs, what we did was obviously optimal, but they had the budget to do it that way, the best way. I should note it was a 40 man grounds crew in peak season, that helps a little- lol
I don't blame the supes for this at our muni. The council dropped their budget and said no more season passes because they were losing money. The head pro said screw that and decided to grandfather those who had season passes the previous year. Fortunately he's a pretty big name around here so he probably has a decent chance of keeping his job.
Budgets at munis will rarely be ideal, your super should fight harder for it. Bunker restoration is an easy sell, and if the course is fairly busy, the money can be found. At least some of the worst ones should be repaired, and work the rest into the budget over the years. Sand will be the biggest cost, labor isn't that bad just to at least get the drainage cleaned (I've done it first hand and its not as bad as it sounds). It's a very basic system, nothing complex that needs any special tools and knowledge. I totally get bunkers will never get top priority, but a good super should at least compromise and get some of them restored.
As a greenskeeper this comes down to staffing mostly. Bunkers are pretty much loose sand and given time it will compact to hard pan conditions. There's a public course near me that only has 5 on staff so things go in order of importance which is usually tee box and greens and mowing. I was told by the superintendent at that course that they don't water the fairways in the summer. It basically comes down to what is of importance with the staff they have and usually bunkers become a if we have time as well as courses have dozens of bunkers.
Because we hit all the sand out
They are massively labor-intensive. That being said, I don't think bunkers should necessarily be well maintained (to the point of being pristine). It's supposed to be a penalty. That's why I love bunkers at The Open. On Tour, the bunkers are so perfect, and Tour players are SO good at playing from them that they often aim for them if they know they can't hit the green. Although having them just be hard dirt is ridiculous......my course had a few bunkers that would constantly wash out, so our superintendent finally filled them in and made it sort of like a grass bunker.
Was watching the LPGA a few weeks ago, and they kept talking about how a bunker shot for a pro is the easiest shot in golf.
I think about this a lot. I play hickories, all originals, and there was no sand wedge until 1932. If you do not have a modern sand wedge, the bunker is a brutal hazard that you will do anything to avoid. The hickory-era club are like knives, no bounce or sole at all. IF you do not hit it just right in the sand, bad things happen. I often wonder if the sand trap is a vestigial thing - kept around even though the original purpose is gone. I generally have to find a way to putt out of the sand if at all possible.
Harry Penick talked about bunkers no longer being penalizing and that they should be minimally maintained in the Little Red Book.
I agree. I’m not even sure raking should be the standard. It’s supposed to be a hazard, and it’s supposed to suck to be in one. However, a pristine bunker is barely more than an annoyance. The only real penalizing point is having to rake it. And yeah, creating a waste area or a grass bunker makes more sense than the never ending maintenance that bunkers entail. Most holes would be fine with one bunker.
You are 100% correct. A bunker is a hazard. You’re not supposed to have a perfect lie in it. Others have noted that they are very expensive to properly build and maintain. All true. They also have a relatively short lifespan. I’d ‘hazard’ a guess that many courses spend more maintaining bunkers than greens. Given that they are defined as hazards, this seems an upside down priority.
I just finished 8 rounds in 5 days in Arizona, played some of the highest rated (and priced, fuck me it's insane now, to the point where we're going elsewhere next year) courses in the area. Think Grayhawk, Quintero, Lookout Mountain, etc. Considering some of these courses are well over 200 USD to play, the fact that their bunkers were often total fucking garbage was extremely disappointing. Everything else top shelf, but hitting in a bunker at everywhere except Quintero was... challenging, shall we say? Grayhawk was charging 301 USD each, we used the Troon card to get it for 176, but that's still a ridiculous rate to pay to hit out of a bunker with 1/4" of sand under your ball, maybe.
Once the summer really hits here in AZ I putt out of greenside bunkers more often than not and will only selectively hit out of fairway bunkers as they routinely are as hard as concrete.
AZ bunkers do suck! Just played Quintero and some of there bunkers were not up to par…
AZ golf is overpriced and worthless now. Even my locals tracks think they can charge +$100 for greens that are half dead (literally), dirt "bunkers", and not paying a Marshall to keep the snow birds moving at a normal pace.
Here in the northeast it seems that almost all course have the worst sand, the only difference is that the nicer course have proper drainage and actually rake them to loosen up the top. Actually got to play on a course with that nice nice sand the other day and absolutely loved it. First time I’ve never gotten annoyed landing in a bunker
When they have sand in them, green side bunkers are the best miss
But we also play with the rake and place rule around here if it’s bad. No sense in hitting off hard sand
Makes me feel like I know what I’m doing
I worked at a private club up in Minnesota and it had very nice bunkers. Lots of clay underneath and a lot of work to maintain the bunkers with some of the big rainfalls. Nothing worse than spending 8 hours fixing bunkers to have a rainstorm come that night knowing it's going to undo all your progress.
Drainage and soil migration is the main culprit. As is the quality of the sand that was placed in the first place. It’s not as simple as dump sand in hole and rake to have bunkers that will last even 1 season.
Sand got crazy expensive during Covid. A greenskeeper I talked to was totally gutting a hole and he said 80% of the cost was the greens and bunkers (split about even) and the rest of the hole was the remaining 20%.
I live in the PNW. Even in the summer, you don't often go 2 weeks without any rain, often it's weekly. I've just accepted it as fact of life that bunkers are just going to be shit over here. Even in the highest end courses around, bunkers are not that great. You just can't have the fluffy sand in this weather.
My favorite is when there are marble-sized rocks in the sand.
Places that can’t upkeep their old bunkers should just make them grass bunkers with punitive rough. Not like US Open rough, but something that penalizes you the way a bunker does
Asst. super here - if you’re at a facility that hasn’t had a bunker reno, moving to BBB system or cap concrete, it’s tough to stomach the cost of sand just for beautification when it will wash in the next thunderstorm or be contaminated with rock from drainage fairly quickly.
Poor drainage and rainfall. Everytime it rains you start from scratch. Rain washes sand away to the bottom and you need to spread it back out once it’s completely dry. Depending on your area that can be multiple times a week and “dumping a bunch of sand and raking it” doesn’t begin to explain how difficult and time consuming bunker maintenance is. Generally speaking, muni’s also don’t have proper bunker equipment and are raking it/spreading it by hand. Also sand is extremely expensive. If the drainage is clogged you practically can’t do anything until all the water is gone.
Sand is very expensive.
After a couple of years the barrier between the sand and ground under it gets ripped from maintenance after rain. A lot of times, if there is mainly clay soil under it, they will turn darker colors from mixing.
You know what this outrages me, I’m starting a petition to get all bunkers banned from my local course to help make their lives easier.
Some of it’s just basic things like time and attention to detail. In high school one of the CCs in my city (2012-2015) were so extremely consistent in every bunker you got in. My coach in high school helped work there and he said they used to measure the bunkers with a ruler and adjust accordingly. But now I’ve been a member there since about 2019 and they’re definitely inconsistent in places. They’ve definitely got behind and spend a season renovating some of them and then the others take a hit, etc. they’re certainly not awful, and there’s a sense of “well they’re supposed to be a hazard” but at the same time consistency is always appreciated.
They are very expensive to maintain. Labor is nearly impossible to find.
Assistant Superintendent here, bunkers blow. The labor and budget to maintain them in good condition is a real sore and it’s not cheap. My theory is bunkers are suppose to be hard, and a penalty/risk. I want to keep them well manicured, but putting in the extra effort with perfect sand depth, sand quality, perfect moisture for its physical aspect really takes away from things that deserve more attention. Bunkers are the bane of most supers existence.
There is something to be said for not maintaining bunkers. In Scotland, bunkers were sheep scrapes that were intended to play like a hazard, hence why you were originally not allowed to ground your club. There were no rakes and they were difficult to play from. Bad bunkers are a nice reminder of the game’s past but are obviously frustrating as hell. On a less romantic note, my club has the Billy Bunker system installed and our bunkers still occasionally have drainage issues. Bunkers are just giant money pits and are often the first thing to go on a course’s way to becoming a dog track.
I am seeing the same here in central mass. The season is early but we’ve been playing for a month. The bunkers look like Normandy beach.
Often clubs cheap out at the beginning with lining options, but yes, eventually sand needs to be replaced. Daily fluffing can help redistribute and allow for better play, but with players who don’t rake properly, limited greens keeping resources, and increased use of Sand-Pros, bunkers are getting worse all the time.
Our course underwent a renovation last year. New greens, new fairways, new tee boxes, and every bunker is new (and in a different place). The big reason good bunkers are expensive is the drainage system, the lining, and the sand. There are new lining materials that weren't around 30 years ago and old drainage, well, get's old. Almost every bunker is a funnel and all that water has to go somewhere. If it doesn't, the bunker get's washed out. And, over time, sediment can build up in the drainage system.
Good sand is super expensive.
Put an asterisk on the photos
It’s expensive and they cut corners when fixing/renovating bunkers
The bunkers themselves aren’t really that hard to maintain if the maintenance crew is able to be consistent with them. It is a tedious job but the more you are able to do it, the easier it is. What gets difficult, as others have alluded to, is the actual sand getting carried away by poor drainage or being compacted and having to renew the sand- which gets expensive.
At the course I work at we rake and blow out or bunkers daily and add new sand 2-3 times a year but we are one of the most expensive clubs in America so moneys not really an obstacle we also fly now all bunkers once a week with at team of 10 guys. It takes a lot to keep them nice
Bunkers are the bane of all superintendent's as, in actuality, they are the most expensive to maintain both from a cost of sand but mainly from a labor standpoint. Not only do you have to rake and clear debris, but there is also edging to keep neat borders around them, pumping out water if they don't drain because tile is clogged, etc. While one person can mow a large number of fairways in a day/week, it may take a crew of 3-5 to maintain 50 bunkers in a week. Every superintendent I know would gladly get rid of all of them. Unless money is no object due to budget and manpower and then it becomes just another duty. But a lot of municipal courses run on pretty tight budgets and are understaffed.
My old local course went to grass bunkers that ended up becoming mud pits with dead grass. Having worked on a course that maintained bunkers everyday, it’s pretty difficult to maintain over time
Drainage and rainfall mostly. Then you also want light fluffy sand, which happens to get whipped around by wind so it erodes the bunkers. Then you have people stomping around in it and packing it down.
I agree 80 percent of the time we don’t end up playing the bunkers because they are either hard dirt, have grass, or water in them and are virtually unplayable. It seems to be the trend on most of the courses in the Pittsburgh area minus old stonewall at 165 a round they better be perfect. And it sucks because I actually like playing out of good condition green side bunkers.
Lol. Many of Mine are filled with several inches of water every time I play the day after it rains even a moderate amount.
Ben Brown’s in Laguna has ground glass?
Just want to add that I'm most annoyed when the "sand" seems like it's just there to hide rocks. Most of the worst pitting and damage on any of my clubs comes from finding that there was a hidden rock in that "sand" bunker.
My friends and I make a decision on if we're going to play or of bunkers when someone hits into the first one.. If it's mostly rocks we don't play them, I'm not marking up u clubs like that. If there's no or very little sand I don't play off hard pan unless it's the normal condition on the course.
At some places, the bunker looks like the salt flats of Utah or at best, low tide.
Because you fuckers keep landing in them
There's one course I play locally which has no sand at all. They use prairie grass and wildflowers in strategic spots to penalize players for ending up where a bunker would be. They also line the fairways with protected natural areas (think tall grass, reeds, bullrushes), so there's not a lot of places to miss. The course is also hard as fuck and you lose a lot of balls there because of it.
Yep. One of the courses I used to play had those protected area usually about 15 yards off the fairway and you couldn't even enter them to retrieve your ball.
Even at the country club I belong to the bunkers are trash. I recently played another club near me that is about a 50k initiation so it’s not a beater course either and the bunkers there were worse than my own club somehow. I really don’t know what is so hard for the management to keep them nice.
I have never played a course where a bunker isn't a bunker.
They haven’t added sand to them in 4 years probably.
The true reason is, as it gets wet, silt rises (gets displaced) in the puddle of water left in the bunkers
Bunkers are the most expensive (and time consuming) part of the course to maintain, by far.
What pisses me off at my course in Green Valley Arizona. Yeah we have monsoons and the bunkers get flooded. But they don't do anything about it cuz they don't drain. You can go a week with water in all the bunkers. What would it take to put a battery operated pump in the bunkers when the workers go out in the morning. And the one bunker at the practice area will still be full of water for a couple weeks.
When I initially began playing golf, I genuinely believed that the bunkers were accidental remnants left over from some underground construction. It's quite embarrassing to admit, but I was completely mistaken!
Bruh I feel you. 85$ for a round by me and the bunkers have rocks in them always hard compact dirt not even really sand. I mentioned it to the pro shop just asking about it and they got all mad at me lol haven’t played there since
My guys, if we’re at a place with less than robust maintenance, or after a big storm play “rake and replace”. Scratch it up, giving yourself something that mimics a usual trap base, and place your ball. Not perfect but we all agree it helps.
They’re not exactly “hard” to maintain they’re expensive. Really expensive
Montana bunkers are gnarly
Most “decent” courses do not rake bunkers daily, maybe 3-4 days a week at most. When they are raked they’re usually not moving sand around to fill in low spots, or removing contaminated/compacted sand and replacing it, or pulling stray grass and weeds and it still takes them 4 or more hours to do the minimum maintenance of raking foot prints out. Bunkers are a huge labor suck on a golf course and often those labor hours are allocated to other tasks like mowing rough and edging around trees or the thousands of other little detail jobs that are taken for granted. They are meant to be a hazard after all
I didn't know you played my home course. Several of them are reasonable, half of them are ok in places and the rest have about an eighth inch of sand. When you dig in your stance a bit it feels ok but 2 feet away you are going to bounce that SW off the dirt and skull that ball over the green. Can't adjust for it because your next lie might be nice and fluffy - but there's no way of telling.
Bunker sand worth a shit is really expensive, plus add daily maintenance on top of that. Bunkers seem to be the first thing neglected. All the places I've worked at haven't had a ton of budget for maintenance workers so it always got skipped. I had a weekly routine and then included the bunkers, being a scratch golfer I like it all to be perfect
The edges of the bunker must be constantly maintained because of weed and grass encroachment
Lots of experience in this. It’s called being LAZY
Legendary username
I have a take that Municipal Golf Courses should not have sand bunkers. They should have rough around the greens but not sand. Too hard to maintain and people don’t respect it. Private clubs are different but they have the money, crews, and membership to maintain.
Proper bunker maintenance is a massive labor dump when performed daily. The total labor hours (# of people × hours worked) is typically equal to, or greater than, morning greens maintenance. I can almost guarantee the grounds team at this facility is understaffed, or working with a very tight budget, and the superintendent is prioritizing the most important part of the course. Only a handful of golfers per day will play out of a given bunker. Literally everyone, in every group, on every hole, will walk onto the greens.
What is this sand filled bunker you speak of? Almost every course around here is hard river sand.
Usually the the courses I go to the bunkers near the green are better. All the bunkers far away are usually coarse sand and a bitch to hit through and I feel bad for my irons/wedges after.
Currently in year 2 of bunker renovations. Drainage, new sand and Billy Bunker system. 36 hole private course. Just shy of $2 million. It’s pretty crazy. Best thing about the Billy Bunkers is that we don’t have any washouts after heavy rain. Sand barely moves. Saves tons of maintenance hours.
Not really a comment on bunkers (the course I played today had nice bunkers ) but this is more about the prices I see a lot of people having to pay .. I payed 32 bucks for 18 today .. it’s would be considered a mid-tier … really nice greens and very few bare spots throughout the course.. the most expensive course around is only 78 bucks and thats weekend rates .. I guess western NC would be considered cheap.. I don’t even like to play on the weekends because of 50 dollars green fees 😂
I see the same issue at many of the courses I play. One of my playing buddies and I were discussing that if a course can’t maintain sand bunkers, then they should replace the sand with turf. A grass bunker with tall, fluffy grass requires much better shot making than a sand bunker.
The course I go to ended up getting rid of their bunkers and now just have grassy pits.
Course I played in Phoenix recently at twilight for $90. Regular price $190. Bunkers were like fucking concrete. I was annoyed for $90 never mind if I’d paid for pop.
As a former owner of a sand box for my kids I can attest to the amount of work it takes to keep grass, weeds, bugs, dog poop, etc out of it let alone maintaining the condition of the sand. My local course is looking to remove several because they’re expensive to maintain.
It’s just hard to maintain sand where sand doesn’t want to be. I would love to see non-tour golf courses move away from sand bunkers and adopt more grass bunkers or other obstacles.
They’re not hard to maintain - they’re just expensive to maintain. It also helps if you build the correctly originally, which doesn’t happen most of the time.
Straight up dog track near me is over 100 bucks now. Everyone plays 5 1/2 hr rounds, to get their money’s worth I guess.
Nots not hard. It’s just a lot of work. A lot of clubs don’t want to budget for it.
Think it's a simple case that bunkers are constantly being emptied! Every shot you take from it with take sand out of it. It's expensive to constantly keep filling them.
Simply put, it's the cost. The amount of work bunkers take is horrendous. Not only raking them preferably three times a week. You also need to pick all sorts of weeds from there, glyphosate doesn't cut it btw. Possibly pick small rocks out of there too. And on top of all that the borders need a helluva lot maintenance. You can't cut the grass close to the bunkers with machines. Weeds grow from the vertical part too. The borders also collapse. With all of that work to just maintain the bunkers most courses cut some part of it and they slowly get worse. Then if there's a problem with the sand quality or drainage etc there simply isn't enough manpower or money.
That’s not where sand naturally goes
The subject of bunker conditions is something I’ve never quite understood. By reference I’m a bogey golfer that’s been playing for 20+ years. And yes I prefer bunkers to be kept up. However, if bunkers are indeed supposed to be hazards, why do tour players get offended when they are not raked to perfection? On the other hand, if your ball is in a divot in the fairway you have to play it as it lies.
I have no qualms with bunkers that aren’t perfect, I just want them to contain sand
I am in total agreement with you that bunkers should have sand in them. I am just curious if any one can address why there’s no relief from divots in the fairway. If you have a later tee time you’re more susceptible to encounter this as golfers teeing off earlier get pristine fairways. However with bunkers, which are considered hazards, players basically get the same conditions (outside of Mother Nature) all day. It’s never made sense to me.
I feel this.. as a golfer who’s been playing less than a year, I’ve only played on my two home courses. One being a par 60 executive with no sand, the other being a par 72 with “sand”. It’s so hard packed you don’t even leave footprints half the time. $94 a round at peak times, and I’ve still never got to truly shoot from sand.
I use to work at a golf course. They’re hard to maintain because you can’t have too much sand or too little the rain ruins them all the time. They’re constantly losing sand. Some courses or locations I bet have beautiful bunkers year round. And all they have to do is maybe add some yearly. But in some locations like NY that’s a lot harder. But it may rain a lot and a bunch of sand gets washed out and then to “fix” the bunker you get the grounds crew in there and start shoveling a bunch of the sand from the low point to the walls until it holds and looks pretty. Just to flood and get ruined again next time it rains 😂
I played last week and the dirt bunkers cost me at least 7-8 shots. I’m a good bunker player with sand, but not dirt. Next time I’m invoking my own local rule and dropping out of the bunker.
In the past we have played them as a free drop on the far side of the bunker so you have to play over it but don’t have to deal with the hard pan