Meet A City of Dalton Employee - Kodey Cross, Superintendent of Nob North Golf Course
Thursday, May 19th, 2022
The City of Dalton is special because of the people who work hard every day to make it the best place to live, work, and play in Georgia. The City is proud of the men and women working to serve our residents. This article continues a series of profiles we'll be running from time to time to spotlight the special people who are making a difference in our city.
Kodey Cross is in his first week back as the superintendent of the Nob North Golf Course. He grew up in Whitfield County, graduating from Northwest Whitfield High School in 2009 before attending Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College (ABAC) and earning his bachelor's degree in turf grass and golf course management. From there, he began a career overseeing golf courses that took him to the South Carolina low country, back to Georgia in Macon and then Warner Robins before finally coming home to oversee Nob North where he first started working in the industry as a crew member.
Here's a Q&A with Cross about his career and his thoughts on coming home to Dalton:
When you tell people you’ve got a degree in turf grass and golf course management they probably think, that’s neat, you just play golf all day. But there’s a whole lot that goes into that, right?
Yeah, there’s a lot of agronomy, a lot of science, and that’s what kind of got me hooked on this industry in the first place was to move from landscaping into golf. It’s a lot of science with chemicals and agronomy with plant health and plant science and things like that. Plant biology and things like that. So it's turf science coupled with a business degree.
So you had a landscaping background before you got into golf?
Yes, I was just cutting yards and landscaping and things like that. Doing some irrigation, working with a local landscaping company. I actually went to ABAC to get a turf degree and started here at Nob as a crew guy and did my internship here at Nob through school but my background before that was in landscaping. I thought that this was the step up from the landscape industry was moving into golf and then I realized how much goes into keeping one of these golf courses at its highest level.
After school, you went to work in South Carolina. Did you get to work with golf courses right after graduation?
Yeah, I actually worked as a crew guy at ABAC’s golf course, Forest Lakes, for two years. It was only a nine-hole course, but they promoted me to an assistant role, so I had a management role there while I was still in school. Then I landed a job at Bray’s Island Plantation in Beaufort, South Carolina which was a private equity place. You had to own a house on the property to play the course. We only did about 20,000 rounds a year, it was very high end, overseeded like Augusta. We only really did a lot of play in May. But yeah, that was a really nice experience going somewhere private like that that had all the money that you could imagine to do whatever they needed to do. And then coming back to Macon, which is where I moved next to be closer to my family, that was a country club as well. It was private, it was a little bit of an older facility, so we had a little more challenge and a little less help, a little less money. So then I got to experience that life. And then I got offered the superintendent job at International City Golf Club which is owned by the City of Warner Robins. I took that over and kinda flipped it over the first year, they had a lot of problems with the greens and we renovated – well, not a full renovation but we were able to get those spots grown back in on the greens and really increased play. I did a good enough job for them to promote me to superintendent over the recreational grounds as a whole, so I was taking care of 22 city parks that included a football complex, three baseball complexes, and then another 18 or 19 passive parks that had splash pads and pavilions and trails and that kind of stuff. I was doing all of that on top of the golf course with a crew of 8. So it was a very different experience from what I’d done prior to that in my career and it presented a lot of challenges as far as the help and stuff goes and having less money to work with. So I’ve kind of seen facets of all different levels of the industry all the way from the super private high end golf course where it’s “let’s see how much money we can spend this year” to other places where you have to get out there and do stuff yourself because there’s nobody else to do it.
This is your first week back at Nob North so you're still getting into the routine, but take us through a day in the life of a golf course superintendent – what’s the day like and what do you do?
The first thing is just to come in here and try to check the course. I try to get here a little earlier than everyone else and ride the course, make sure that we don’t have any irrigation heads stuck on or any leaks that have popped up. Morning time is a great time to try to spot disease and stuff in the dew, you get a lot of mycelium and things that you can see so you can catch problems a little better in the early mornings. Just looking for things that we might need to take care of that might be outside of our normal scope of work on that ride around, making notes. We’ll go out and check moisture on the greens so I’ve got a meter that I’ll take out that we can put a number to what the moisture content is in those greens and track that. When they might start to visibly changing might be a little later than when that meter would tell you they’re changing. So a lot of diagnostic stuff in the morning, and then I’ll come in here [to the office] and get the crew set on what we’re going to be doing that day. And then I’ll go out and work on what I don’t have people for – like right now I’m changing a sprinkler head – just kind of a catch-all for that kind of stuff that we don’t have anyone to work or do. Through the day, we’ll make lists of little pet projects we can get to whenever we’ve got free time, setting up spray records and a spray plan as far as chemical growth regulation on the fairways to help us with the mowers and what needs to go on the greens as far as fertility and fungicide to help with fungus or weed pressure, stuff that I’ve found in that diagnostic. And then going out there to help the crew, you know I try to be a hands on leader and lead by example and I wouldn’t ask my guys to do anything that I wouldn’t do. So I try to show them I’m here to help and that way we can get our job done. Maybe in the afternoon, go back out and re-check the greens and make sure we don’t have any spots or irrigation issues that might have heads not turning or what have you and we can go out and hand-water. Really just making sure that we’re staying on top of everything that we need to have done.
Ehen you come in to a new job like this, how do you evaluate what shape the golf course is in?
Aesthetically, obviously, first off because that’s what a lot of the golfers pick up on. But even deeper than that, going in and pulling plugs and pulling soil samples and that kind of thing to see where we actually are with what’s in the soil that’s available to the plant and things like that. Little things that would add to the visual appeal for the golfers, and then green speed is always going to be a big thing for the golfers as far as how fast are they rolling, what things can we do to improve that, you know how much thatch do we have on the greens that can cause trouble later and hurt ball roll and things like that.
So when you explain your job, I’m sure people are surprised by how much goes into it. I’m sure your friends probably assume you just go out there and mow the greens.
Yeah, just go out and mow the grass. As a superintendent I can tell you I’ve probable ridden a mower twice in six years. The mowing is kind of something that is essential but there’s so much more than goes along with the mowing, that’s a very small part that we put off on our part-time help or the crew guys to get that done. I would say that it’s 30 percent of the job versus the other 70 is trying to keep the turf alive and keeping it as healthy as we can keep it and keep the playing surfaces in as good a shape as you can.
What kind of challenges do you see for Nob North that might need to be addressed as you start out here?
The irrigation system is rather dated given the age of this place in general. They’ve made a lot of improvements over the years just in terms of the controllers and some of the heads as we go. But the irrigation system is the life blood of the golf course. You can almost directly correlate the condition of the golf course with the quality of the irrigation system. I think with this one, it’s held up really well, it was built really well. But it’s just getting ot that point where the age is starting to cause problems. Rust is causing holes in pipe and heads are starting not to work and things like that, so I think that’s going to be a big challenge. And to go along with that, drainage in some areas is a challenge. How water moves when it rains, drains under the ground to help drain off the green and stuff. With all of the trees that are here and around the edges that have been removed in the past, you get a lot of root encroachment into those drains. They just get clogged up over time. You know they’ve been in the ground for however long so I think that’s another issue that we’ll deal with, with dirt washing and that kind of thing. Other than that, the grass is actually – this is some of the original 419 which is the type of grass we’ve got in the fairway and the rough and the tees, and that original genetic structure of the grass before it’s been replicated time and time again was a fantastic specimen whenever It came out and I think it gives us a fantastic base to work with. So, despite the problems the grass seems to thrive pretty well through those challenges that we might face with water or drainage. It’s definitely high use. We try to do what we can in the mornings, because you can’t really do anything in the afternoon because we’re so busy. And not having a maintenance day, like a lot of private courses will close down for a day during the week top get some of that maintenance stuff handled and that’s a challenge to, to work around the golf. But that’s obviously the whole reason we’re here and doing what we’re doing, to try to take care of the membership as much as we can.
How cool is it to be back here at what you probably consider your home course and in your home town?
Yeah, it’s definitely cool. It feels full circle to me, to have started my career in this industry here – like I didn’t play golf in high school, I was riding horses and doing other stuff - coming out here [to Nob North] was what really opened my eyes to the fact that I love this industry, I love what we do out here, I am proud to come out here to work morning and that kind of stuff. Just as a crew guy, and that set the trajectory for the job that I ended up having here as the superintendent. It’s actually really neat to have gone out and moved around the southeast a little bit and ended up back here. This was always the dream. I had a really good gig in Warner Robins. It was a lot of stress and a lot of pressure, but they took really good care of me and I would have not taken probably any other job in the state except for this one. So for it to have come open and for me to have this opportunity has been fantastic for me and my family.
Obviously there’s plenty of institutional memory available with Michael Hendricks who was the superintendent of Nob North for a long time, he’s still around as the superintendent over all of the Parks and Rec Department facilities. How nice is it to have him available as a resource?
Yeah, most definitely. And me and Michael have stayed in contact throughout my career. And even during the renovation, he called me because I’ve been on Bermuda grass my whole career - other than whenever I started here as a crew guy was my only bent grass experience - every other course I’ve been at I’ve been on Bermuda. Obviously with the renovation he was calling me to kinda talk about this one or that one and that kind of thing and we’ve stayed in contact, so yeah he’s an excellent contact he’s done an excellent job with this place. I definitely will lean on him for any issues that I don’t think I can handle for myself, and get that information and that long-term knowledge that he has. It’s a lot different from most people, they don’t have that luxury of having someone still in the organization that they can reach out to and ask, “hey, why are these heads on 10 not working?” or “what is this spot that keeps dying on the back of 18 tee” and that kind of thing. So it’s definitely going to be a big help to have him still in the fold to reach out to.
What’s you favorite golf movie?
Probably “Tin Cup.” I liked “Tin Cup.”
Is working at a golf course anything like “Caddyshack”?
No, I would say not (laughing). Other than the fact that there are really gophers out there, but you know that’s probably as factual as it gets as far as the poor old greens keeper.
