DEWITT – As I stood on the green of Drumlins West’s fifth hole, a faulty sprinkler that refused to turn off cycled back toward where I was standing. Next to me was Assistant Course Director Dan Coyne, who was yanking a cup out of the ground. It was about 9 a.m. and the sun had yet to warm the course as the temperature lingered in the 40s. A thick frost was just now melting as the first golfers of the day made their way around the course.

Quickly I warned Dan, who had his back to the sprinkler, and walked out of its range – too cold to get wet. Dan let out a blas ‘Oh’ and threw his hood on as he continued to work. The water pelted his raincoat.

Believe it or not, the course maintenance team at Drumlins works year round. Between April and Thanksgiving, the team is on the course seven days a week cutting grass, moving holes, servicing the irrigation system, raking bunkers and gathering downed tree limbs and trash. During the other three months, they sharpen the blades of their mowers, fix golf carts and attempt to predict the first and last snow of the season.

The club employs four full-time workers to keep its 18 holes in playing shape, and in order to do that, they must stay ahead of the day’s golfers. That means during the height of the season, they are at work by 6 a.m.

For one day last week, course manager Mark DeFilippo invited me to join his team as they carried out routine maintenance. He warned me up front that he was still not at full capacity for the summer – he’d yet to hire the 10 seasonal workers he’ll have – and frost kept them off the course until 7:30 a.m. most days. Still, my experience gave me a new appreciation for the work they do.

I arrived at Drumlins last Thursday at about 7:20 a.m. As I walked around back of the maintenance department building, a small house, I could see Mark’s team was ready to go. Overnight, the temperature dipped into the low 30s, but it was sunny and the forecast said it would reach 70. A sweatshirt and jeans, I figured, would be warm enough, though as I looked at the crew in front of me sipping coffee, I had doubts.

The key to this job, especially in early spring, is dressing in layers. The guys were wearing heavy coats, hats and gloves, but by noon they were in T-shirts. The course itself undergoes a similar warming each day. Until late April, Mark must delay tee times by posting frost warning signs on the first holes of both the public and private courses.

‘Eight out of 10 times, it’s OK to walk on,’ he said. ‘But there’s no green thumb, and you can kill grass pretty easily.’

Mark’s been at Drumlins for 28 years. He graduated from the University of Rhode Island with a degree in Plant Pathology and Etymology. He started at Drumlins during his graduate work at SUNY-ESF in Forest Etymology. Suffice it to say, Mark knows a lot about plant life.

Mark lifted the frost signs at 7:54, and a pack of golfers was ready to play.

The full-timers – Mark, Dan, Hank Jones and Louie the mechanic – were already at work by then. Every morning, someone must drive a cart to each hole where the grass will be cut and pick up tee boxes, and anything else on the course that shouldn’t go through a lawn mower. The crew alternates between the public and private courses two or three times a week and they switch jobs on a daily basis.

Mark threw me into the fire the way he does most of his workers, Dan later explained. He gave me a golf cart and sent me onto the course to find my way around.

Zooming down the fairway of the first hole of the private course, I realized my clothing deficiency. My ears were freezing and the wind filled my zip-up hoodie. I observed the guys cutting grass and drove up to the public course’s back nine where I saw some squirrels, a gopher and a jogger going through. As I made my way back down to the first private hole, I cut across a pair about to tee off. I realized golfers get right to it once the frost lifts.

Last week, there were four or five cutters on any given day. Mark had rehired Sam, a 20-something Onondaga Community College student who’s worked seasonally for the past five years, and Steve, who was in his first week. Cutting on a golf course, for those unfamiliar with the game, is much different than cutting a lawn. There are rough mowers that keep grass to baseball-field length, giant 20-foot wide mowers that trim fairways to crew-cut length, more precise mowers for fringes and still more precise mowers that maintain greens.

Mark explained to me that although golf courses look like they have the healthiest grass in the neighborhood – indeed, I saw no brown spots at Drumlins – it’s a misconception. For example, to keep greens fast, you must treat them like a pit bull prize fighter: feed them so they’re always hungry.

I followed Steve around for a few holes as he picked up the tee boxes and gathered cans from trash barrels. Steve has a landscaping background, and this week he is learning to cut greens. Then I switched to Dan, a Drumlins veteran, as he changed the pin placements.

Cup-cutting is a six step process, and Dan could switch the placement of a cup in five minutes flat. First, he took the pin and cup out of the green. Next, he decided where to put the new hole. Then he made the new hole with an elaborate cup cutter: Dan would bang this round tubular device that looks like a jackhammer into the green, tighten a lever and pull turf out of the ground. After that, he lowered the cup cutter into the old hole and released the exact amount of turf to fill it. Last, he put the cup and flag into the new hole and watered over the old one.

The hardest part of this process is deciding where to put the new hole. On Thursday, Dan was preparing for three weekend tournaments at Drumlins. Two of the tournaments’ directors had come to the course and marked with paint where they wanted their cups during the tournaments. This made things easy for Dan during the weekend but hard for Thursday and Friday. Many greens are small and sloped at odd angles. When you mark off two unique spots for holes, it makes it tough to find a good third spot other than where the hole currently is.

As Dan cut a new hole on 12, Tommy, an SU sophomore, drove by: ‘That’s too easy man,’ he yelled over the groan of his mower. ‘Too easy.’

‘That’s what they want, though,’ Dan yelled back.

Later, Dan elaborated: ‘Golfers baffle me. They want a challenge, and then they don’t want a challenge. You mess with their handicap and they’re not happy.’

Two or three times during the morning, Dan told me he expected negative feedback on his hole placement. But with so little choice, he didn’t know what else to do. For about two hours, I learned the art of cup-cutting, and during that time, Dan and I talked about his work. He has two kids and was obviously pretty smart, so I prodded him on why he wanted to do manual labor.

‘You can’t beat being outdoors all day,’ he said. ‘And working with Mark is easy. He’s a great boss.’

I left Dan at about 10:30 a.m. and headed back to ‘home base’ to ask Mark more about his workers and what makes them tick. He told me staffing is actually his biggest challenge as course superintendent. When he started in the 1980s, he’d receive 30 applicants for his 10 seasonal jobs, but now he’s lucky to get 10 applicants for 10 jobs. And sometimes those hires just aren’t ready for the hours and the labor ahead of them.

‘Back then, guys would still go out all night and just come here and sleep in their cars in the parking lot,’ he said. ‘I’d come here in the morning and knock on their windows to wake them up for work. They partied hard but they never called in.’

Mark said his former employees include a dentist, a CEO of a company, a pilot and the now infamous SU student Jessica Cutler.

‘It just takes a certain person to want to work here,’ Mark said. ‘You like the hours and you enjoy the outdoors. …This is a nationwide problem, that’s why so many golf courses in the South are turning to immigrant workers.’

Dan and the crew were winding down their morning jobs as they prepared for their 11:30 lunch (they usually finish for the day at 2:30 p.m.). Dan joined my conversation with Mark and they talked about a common love for birds. Two of Mark’s part-time workers are retired men who enjoy the perk of free golf. Still, others are just a rare breed who don’t like sitting behind a desk.

By this point, I’d come to admire the work Mark and his team do. Some never golf, but they all took tremendous pride in keeping the course in perfect condition.

‘I remember one lady,’ Dan said, ‘She was teeing off near a hawk’s nest and the mother was looking right at her. She said, ‘Is that an eagle?”

‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s a hawk.’

Published on June 4, 2007 at 12:00 pm