Turf squelches as you walk through it. Parts of fairways are nothing but bare ground, save for the aeration holes trying to force some drainage into the still sodden surface.
Away from some of the main playing areas it looks like a music festival has just left town. It’s a muddy mess, there are no other words for it. Deep footprints are gouged. The tracks of trolleys reveal more temporary scars.
Yet the countdown to the return of the competition season is accelerating. Honestly, what on earth are we doing here?
This winter has been one of the wettest since records began nearly 200 years ago. If you live in the West Midlands, or Cornwall, or Leicestershire, it’s the wettest you’ve ever seen.
If you’re in southern England, or Northern Ireland, it’s the wettest in a decade. But this is no longer unusual.
We saw more rain than in the winter of 2023 than we had in the previous 40 years. It 2024, it was severe flooding that closed courses.
It won’t take long to recover once the temperatures rise, people tell me. But I’m looking right now at a weather forecast that’s predicting rain on eight of the next 14 days.
I think greenkeepers all over the UK have once again performed wonders just to get our courses open at all over the last couple of months.
But they are not miracle workers. There is only so much you can do even when the temperatures start to turn.
It’s getting more and more difficult to produce the sort of surfaces we would like when the traditional golf competition season is meant to get under way. And it is getting under way very soon.
There will barely be a club that doesn’t have something scheduled for the first weekend in April. I know of many that kick off at the end of March. We are just not ready for it.
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Yes, we’ve still got preferred lies and we’ll probably extend them into May. Yes, we can bring in ground under repair – and other temporary rules – for the worst affected areas.
But we can’t make the ball run any further. And if you’ve been playing on a shorter winter layout for the last few months, you’re going to get a big shock when that course has the best part of 1,000 yards added to it very soon.
This isn’t a new phenomenon by any means. “Quite foolishly we still seem obsessed with getting ready for a March opening day, or definitely by the first of April,” Jim Croxton, chief executive of the British & International Golf Greenkeepers’ Association told The Herald in Scotland this time last year.
“My personal view is that I don’t think the golf season really arrives until at least Easter and probably more into May.
“But unfortunately clubs are determined to have that first medal of the year on that first weekend of April, or whatever it may be, and very often the course is not quite ready because we have had a cold spring, and we may not have even finished some of the winter work because of all these other difficulties.”
What’s changed in the ensuing 12 months? If anything, it feels like we’re in a worse spot now than we were in 2025.
Why does the golf competition season have to begin in April?
We need to stop playing competitions altogether in April. I don’t care what the World Handicap System says about ‘no off-season’. There has to be some common sense applied in a bleak British winter.
So why not just move the season a few weeks to start at the beginning of May?
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Your course manager will be delighted. Why do they need to be put under so much stress to try and hit an impossible meteorological deadline?
They will love that extra four and a bit weeks. It’s 30 more days where everything gets a little warmer and the days get longer. 30 days where aerated greens and surroundings knit into smoother putting surfaces. 30 days where saturated ground can dry out before tournament shots are hit in anger.
I’ve travelled the country for a decade now talking to greenkeepers and asking them about the scheduling of some of their club’s big early season events.
Many have told me it’s too early for them to take place. Their course conditions, purely because of a winter that refuses to leave or an early spring that’s yet to truly fire, aren’t as they would want.
And, if we’re honest with each other, they’re not as we want either.
So the question is: if it’s so bloody hard, why hold those important competitions so early at all? Tradition? Prestige? A committee that can’t properly comprehend what they see when they look at the course from their windows?
Just alter the calendar.
We don’t need to worry about losing time. These days, October is a virtual extension of summer but lots of clubs have already packed the golf competition tees away before the month has really begun.
If your club doesn’t do it already, why not utilise all of it in a glorious last tribute to the year? The conditions are still on our side – at least until the clocks go back.
If we can’t, careful scheduling can still mean the only casualties will be the odd midweek medal and will anyone be so bereft about that?
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It’s possible I’m viewing this through the prism of my own experience – and through rose-tinted spectacles – but it feels to me like the best golf of the year can now arrive later in the calendar.
We’ve got to start taking advantage of that.
Now have your say
What do you think? Is dealing with early season conditions just part of the test or would moving back the golf competition calendar a few weeks benefit everyone? Let me know with a comment on X.
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