There have been a couple of major improvements at the Lampman Golf Course that has seen the course attract more people and interest.
“They started off by putting in artificial greens,” said area resident Maureen Ulrich, whose husband Randy helped spearhead the projects. “Then they realized they should do some watering around the greens so they put in a watering system.”
They wouldn’t have been able to do that, Ulrich said, if it wasn’t for the flood of 2011 that left a whole bunch of water.
“It seemed to make sense to make use of it,” she said.
The watering system has changed the look and feel of the course to make it a more lush grass.
“If you’re driving off the fairway, instead of being hard ground it’s lush,” Ulrich said. “The course right now is in the best shape it’s ever been and it helps a little bit to get that 12 inches of rain two weeks ago.”
If that rain did nothing else positive, it replenished the water level at the golf course’s lake.
“And we had a lot of sponsorship along the way,” Ulrich said. “They were very generous at the outset when it came to putting in funding for the greens, and then we had a lot of community support and local businesses that showed up when (they) did the installation.”
Ulrich’s husband, who works in the pipe supervision industry, and some local businesses and volunteers installed the watering system themselves.
The greens were a marked improvement on what they had before.
“We had sand greens, which were no fun,” she said. “Now it’s great. People can come out and… they say they’re a bit livelier than what you’d find on natural greens. But at least you don’t have to rake them and it turns out to be a little bit of a challenge.”
The wintering process includes blowing out the lines for the watering system.
“It was a bit of a struggle in the spring getting everything running again. There’s a few fittings that need to be changed,” Ulrich said. “One of the problems we had, I think at the end of last year was that the lake was becoming a slough, we were sucking in mud and sediment into the lines. That presented some challenges.”
But Randy Ulrich got a call from a course in smalltown Ontario that has grass greens. It costs them a lot of money to get them back in shape with winterkill and they were asking about the artificial greens Lampman has.
There was a grand opening for the nine-hole course on Sunday that the community was invited to attend.
The course has been far more utilized than it has before, even with a volunteer-only staff.
“We have a really good high school program and they come out to golf on it,” Ulrich said. “They raised the family fee to $450 a year, which is pretty reasonable compared to bigger and more competitive courses.”
They also were the beneficiary of four used golf carts for those who wish to use them on the course.
The fees are $15 for nine holes and $10 per person cart rentals for nine.
