Golfers can handle a difficult course, but can they handle a course that is unpredictable? Say, for example, the bunker that was firm and playable on the ninth hole becomes a black hole on the fourteenth, swallowing everything that comes it’s way, and a player can sense something is wrong, even if they can’t put their finger on what. That’s inconsistency, not difficulty, and most golfers understand the difference.
Variability from shot to shot kills confidence and trust, and the biggest cause of those problems is how the bunker is playing from week to week
When traps are firm, soft, deep faced, shallow faced, they can all be overcome, so long as a golfer has confidence and trust in the course. What robs them of both is inconsistency in the face of conditions during a round or, even worse, from round to round. One trap plays like packed clay so you hit it with ball-first contact, the next plays like beach sand so you dig way too much, and the third one (because of some kind of bounce/luck factor) leaves a fried egg lie that has nothing to do with the swing, and a player will rightly blame that on poor design even if the cause has more to do with the conditions underground
No superintendent understands this more than those who have the job of maintaining the course. When players complain about the greens, they often talk about speed or firmness, but when they complain about the traps, they often mean the course was built poorly. Players begin to wonder why the course was built the way it was.
Grain matters more than grooming
When budgets are set for labor and materials, many fall prey to the myth that a rake schedule will somehow turn fluffy sand into a playable lie if enough time is spent fluffing up the top inch after a rain or irrigation. It won’t. Grain shape will decide, for good or ill, if that trap will hold for a week after moisture has passed through it or compact into a hardpan within a couple days of being damp
Angular grains lock together when under pressure, which is good for the face of the trap but bad for the ability to play to the grain, especially if and when moisture gets into the mix. Rounded grains keep a bunker loose but drain too readily, making it easy to play but impossible for the ball to sit in a stable lie. Somewhere in the mix between angular and rounded are the ideal bunker sands, and it’s a design specification problem, not a maintenance problem
The USGA Green Section has a set of recommended bunker sand specs that state no more than 10% of the mixture should be retained on a 2.0 mm sieve and no more than 20% should pass through a 0.25 mm sieve. That falls right in the middle, allowing drainage without becoming too tight in the face of moisture. Outside of that range and a bunker will either be too hard or too soft to play, no amount of raking will change the fundamental distribution problem.
What’s underneath decides what’s on top
The condition of bunker sands are ultimately decided by what is underneath, and proper grading and drainage will decide whether a trap will hold water and turn sloppy or be firm enough to stand in after a storm. If the sub grade of a bunker is improperly graded or incapable of shedding excess water, all the time and effort spent choosing and installing the right golf course bunker sand can go to waste, as the top layer will be unable to drain quickly enough to allow play to resume soon after a storm has passed.
This goes back to the same design point mentioned previously in that a bunker is placed on a course to induce a specific shot from a player. A firm bunker shot, a low runner, or a shot hit with more elevation due to a proximity to the green. The inability to play any of these shots consistently takes a toll on the player, and they will often blame the condition of the sand for their struggles
Moisture is the variable nobody controls
Even with the proper sand and the proper drainage, variation in moisture levels will ultimately decide how a bunker plays from one day to the next, or even from morning to afternoon. Water availability and capillary action will move moisture up through the different layers of bunker construction at different rates depending on the time of year, and a bunker that was firm and grippy at seven a.m. will turn sloppy and unplayable by one p.m. when the combination of irrigation and rising temperatures has caused the sand to swell. Courses that are built in areas of high humidity have a similar issue in that the saturation levels of the local air will cause the local sands to have radically different characteristics from those found in dryer climates.
Sand gets old.
Between the foot traffic, clubs, and weather, sand gets worn down. Coarse and fine material will break down, and a mixture that was originally installed with a certain ratio in mind will, after a few years, be significantly changed as the larger grains grind down into smaller sizes. This can be hastened by contamination from finer material found in the surrounding turf or from silt building up in the trap from erosion after heavy rains or poor drainage. Top dressing will prolong the useful life of a trap, but it won’t bring it back to the condition it was when first installed
Sooner or later, every bunker will need to be reinstalled from the ground up rather than topped off and worked back in. And that’s when your purchase of sand moves from merely a repair or maintenance cost to somewhere in the realm of a capital expenditure. When you as an owner choose to install sand to a particular spec from a supplier who gets it from a particular deposit that has been tested and logged, you get value from that expenditure in that there is significantly less risk that it will require replacement sooner than expected
Consistency pays dividends in ways most courses will never account for
Bunkers can slow play down tremendously when a golfer has to find a playable lie, play their ball out, and re assess their options, and when this happens across the board it will hurt the pace of the whole course, not just where the bunker is
Player perception is also a major factor in terms of maintenance and value. A golfer will often have a much higher opinion of the maintenance of a course based on the condition of the bunkers, more than greens or fairways. A course with a proper bunker sand that feels firm and fair gets a positive reaction from the player even if other aspects of the course are of a lower standard. No amount of raking or spinning can change the feeling of inferior sand underfoot for the average player, and that’s what they will remember most about a visit.
