Summer of 2011, welcome, because it has been a long time coming. While it’s nice to have cool temperatures and mild weather in the spring, cold and uninviting is not particularly welcome in our industry during the spring season. Especially the day after you have aerated greens and front makes its presence for two days in a row and it is cold and windy for the remainder of April, in which nobody seemed to play any golf. It makes it a bit interesting when you are trying to pay bills!
We all have these topsy-turvy conditions and events during our years of employment in this crazy golf industry, but as we venture on through life I think that some of us, including myself, lose site of the larger picture, and that is the focus of our health and family. After our years of devoting ourselves to our profession these are the two that I want to make sure that I still have around me, and hopefully both are in good condition!
I guess the reason why I am writing on this subject is because it does kind of hit home to me. Last year taught me one thing, that whether we lose a little or a lot of turf, we can still reseed and almost everyone forgets how bad it was, and starts to focus on what they have in front of them and under their feet at the present. But when it comes to our health and families’, reseeding isn’t an option. Time doesn’t just heal things, sometimes that is what destroys those things because we don’t stop and take the time to be with our families and focus on our health.
Now I realize that the reality is that our employers don’t always and won’t always see things the way we do, but we have to try to help them see what we see. Is the threat of grass lost worth a stroke or the loss of our family due to our visions being out of focus, to sort of speak? I would answer this no!
Last year taught me that staying till 6:00 in the evening trying to keep things cool probably didn’t accomplish any more than if I would have left work at 4:30 in the afternoon and focused more on what I was going to do in the fall to recuperate what we lost as soon as the temperatures start to retreat. I learned, but not until the beginning of this spring and at the expense of some minor health issues die to high levels of stress. And I’m sure that we all learned something different and we are hopefully able to learn one valuable thing from every adverse situation that we run into.
My lesson learned…”I come first!”
Chad Giebelhaus, President
Crooked Creek Golf Course
