Renovating a Course with Jason Meersman

up phase. I figured it'd be fun to talk to Jason while everything's still fresh in his mind, and also while the Bears are making an unexpected run in the in the NFL. Jason and I are fellow Bears fans, so we talked about this before our big win over the Packers this weekend less and enthusiasm, but big thanks to Jason. Big thanks to Toro for all the support.

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Go to Toro dot com slash commercial, slash builder slash Workman. That's pretty neat that you can customize the Workmen, so check out Toro dot com, or you can always reach out to your local distributor. Let's get to Jason Meersman. All right, Jason, it is a pleasure to have you back on second time guest. I figured it would be

fun to chat. Now. You are in the middle of a full scale renovation of the Patterson Club, where the course that you are a the fine superintendent of, and I got to ask, what's been more fun doing the project?

wife that was a good night. This has been like that, day after day after day after day, so much fun. You know, It's been a long time coming, seeing it for fourteen years, you know, seeing this piece of property and the potential and slowly nagging and annoying grounds chairs and presidents and being as obnoxious as I could possibly be to keep them on, you know, focused and online when it comes to how this needs to play out.

And fortunately been blessed with great people around me, and I've learned so much from everybody, and we got this thing pulled off, right, And I say pulled off, I mean getting the approval is that's pulled off. Then when you get going to the construction, that's a whole other animal. And my gosh, is it fun. I mean, I think jeger Kovich told me early on, it's got to be a good time. You know, he goes, the work will show.

If it's a good time, the work will show. And if that's the case, oh my gosh, this is gonna be some of the best work anybody's ever seen.

making it. The stuff that we had fun making it, it shows in the final product, Like there's there's an inherent joy that people can see, whether whether it's obvious to them or not, there's a a joy that shows up in the in the project in terms of in terms of the you know, you're doing a lot of stuff. You know, you know, you're it's a it's a big project.

What's been something that you you've had a lot of fun doing that you didn't necessarily know you were gonna have a lot of fun doing during this project.

what the heck do you do with all of them? Right? So I would say one of my favorite parts was all right, Dad, no clue was coming. It was like you you're you're sitting there trying to organize these giant bowlders that are like the size of a car, and uh, you know, maybe a small car. But but anyway, long story, short hair, we just started stacking them and I started calling these things Polish pyramids. Because I have some polish in my blood and my my rock work does not

look like Italian mason work. So I started calling them Polish pyramids. And we got some polist pyramids out there, and it's just a way to like clean up an area. It's out of play. What the heck am I looking at over there? Should be kind of fun, but we're gonna have a handful of those out here, kind of by accident.

away sixty. He did the the the Devil's Hollow, which is kind of the lower I called our amen corner of our property, really neat little section of operating great golf. But the last thing he was pushing out was the fourth Green and did a great job and then when he left, Jaeger formed a little mound named him Jeffrey. So Jeffries, we got Jefferys all over though. I mean there's a lot of Jeffries out there.

you guys are in a completely different setting. You're it's like up in like a rocky mount almost mountainous area for the area, correct, yes, correct, Yeah, explain just like the nuance of like how different those these two properties are.

see the sound very easily. And I've been told back on our thirteenth hole, which is our highest part of the property, you used be able to see the sound. But there are a lot of large, large trees on property. There was the superintendent before me did a great job peeling out a lot of trees, and then we've continued that for a long time. But at the same time, it feels like a parkland type golf course. We're very

much in. We call Greenfield Hill, which is a part of Fairfield that sits up on this hill and over looks you know, overlooks Fairfield. When storms are coming at us, they typically hit New York, break up a little bit, go over the sound, Long Island and north of us, so we dodge a lot of weather quite a bit if it's coming from the west. But it's a unique piece of property. It is like an old horse farm.

Mister Banks, the I believe he's don't quote me on anything, cause I got a lot of unique stories I tell about this stuff that I don't know how many are accurate. But he's a former like Rockefeller family extension and own the horse farm next to us. We bought this property. Used to be a horse farm. You find the horse shoes from time to time, but it's it's a family golf course and it's in your neighborhood, you know what I mean. And and like we have the pool, we

have the rackets. We have an amazing clubhouse that's going under that's under renovation right now as well. We're adding some soft seeding outside and an outdoor bar and redoing the redoing the inside bar and the dining room. So kind of a neat section of the project over there is getting done as well. So yeah, but beautiful piece of property. And Robert Trent Jones Senior did a great job laying it out back in the day nineteen forty six.

He did the northwest or north south layout, great scope, a lot of room from green to tea and tea to you know, golf hole to golf hole. But yeah, very interesting, kind of beautiful piece of property out here.

And you guys were kind of in the early string of his designs, which for the most part, you know, if you kind of look at his body of work, the best work, you know, and this is all my opinion, the best work was the earlier work. How did you guys got you and Jaeger and the club go about approaching the renovation understanding? Hey, you know, Robert Trent Jones is a big name in golf architecture, a big part of our history. But we we can possibly improve some areas of this design.

a g established club. There's some great history, you know, the to the Patterson Club, let alone the Banks family, the Rockefellers that owned it beforehand, and then the ge president CEO. Most you know, there's always a standing membership open at Augusta National from what I understand, but I always choked with people that they were probably on the search committee when they hired Robert Trent Jones Senior and said, hey, come on up to Fairfield and whip us up a

golf course. Right. You know, our club was Establis it was in nineteen twenty nine, but is a social club. So in nineteen forty six when they decided to build this golf course, they got the hot young you know architect, the the yeger Kovich of their time. Maybe uh so might argue it's Brian Schneider or whoever. Anyway, there's so many great ones to choose from. However, you know, they grab this young man, Sid, come build us a golf course. And you know we were as he started working at

Augusta National. The next year he did Peach Tree. We're right in the middle of that and when you see the layout, you'll go, oh, yeah, I can see what he was seeing. You know, we have we have some angles on par threes that remind you of sixteen at Augusta. You know. You have you have the uphill that disappeared over time. You have the downhill par three, a lot of variety. You can tell he picked out the par threes early on and then and then kind of built

the rest of the golf course through it. We have like a three shot par five, you know, part five that you almost cannot cannot reach in two. So when we first started doing this, you know, when I first got here. First of all, you know, this golf course was built. I think they spent one hundred thousand dollars building it, and the driving range sat where the eighteenth hole was supposed to be so long story short. Nineteen forty six, they ran out of treework money to remove

these trees and finish the eighteenth hole. They had already built the green, so they instead of playing through the driving range a little dog leg right with a stream running through it, they decided to put the t's on the top of the hill and play it down the hill. And I'm sure they said we'll do this next year, never got to it. So we've been playing that goof It was a goofy golf hole. It was not supposed to be there. Nobody realized why we didn't like it.

But during you know, during our original like when I first got here, we had this this very beautiful clubhouse was just built. I knew for we weren't spending money for a long time. We just did a small, a smaller golf course renovation at that time, unfortunately making our t boxes smaller. It was great work, a lot of great work was done, but we made tea boxes smaller, and we had the kind of the Beth Page Rhys Jones bunkers, very exhausting push mowing bunker banks and tying

up maintenance dollars. So we saw a lot of room for improvement on those things. But we started planning. We did a plan with the Fasio Group and that kind of gave us, that kind of gave me the freedom to start working on a plan that was approved by the membership. You know, we had a cross section of members on this Golf Long Range Planning Committee, so every

one of our members was represented. We'd walk the golf course with Tom mars Off and speak to every single golf shot that every single person would play and seeing the golf course through everybody's eyes is a unique experience, you know, it's you learn so much during those of what you think you know just is not so. And during that time we created a master plan, goals, key initiatives that we still have today. One of them was create more golf practice. We needed a short game practice area.

We only had eight stalls on a range tea. You know, we're northeast, we're locked. We're locked with land. We got the Myott Parkway right next to us, and we got we got members who don't plan on moving, ey our neighbors who don't plan on moving anytime soon. It's a hard one to expand upon. So how can we take what we have, improve it and get all these things that we need done? So, you know, and our key initiatives I wrote a couple of notes here. Our key

initiatives are pretty simple. It was like, keep up with replacing infrastructure right. You have to keep up with irrigation system, your bunkers, make sure the sands right, anything, cart paths, maintenance, facility, drainage, all these things that fail, golf course components that fail. Keep up with that. That was always number one. Number two was to improve practice both short game and long term.

And you know you're overall driving range, so create more golf practice for this very hungry golf golf addicted membership that we have and we're in their backyard, so let's improve the practice, make the course enjoyable, more enjoyable for higher handicappers while making it more strategic for lower handicappers. And then the other one was kind of improve the greens. Create more whole locations so we're not at risk of losing turf because we have to use the same whole

locations every day. You know, green that has three to five hole locations, it's very challenging to to keep grass alive in those areas. So those were kind of some of our goals. So how do we do, you know, how do we do a golf project that takes all in that into you know, we focus on all that. You know, those are kind of our pillars, but every time we looked at something, does it match that? So jaeger Kovich was asked, all right, we want a better

shortcame practici er, we want driving RNG. We feel like this part of our property would be good for it. You tell us what you see and he came up here of a stroke a genius. There's a redance style of par three sitting on a hillside that we've been playing up and down for so long, and let's just play it from a different angle. So he saw that with that we could take our old seventeen that was eighteen. We could take our old seventeen and make it a

par five. So we used to finish on a par four, par four, par four, part four finish four in a row, and it was kind of a hay maker at the end of the round. It was exhausting. We saw this opportunity to go part four, par four, par five, par three finish and create this great short game practice area, make two better golf holes than what we had, and

kind of solve the appetite. With that, we got to change the routing of the golf course front nine, back nine switch, which in my opinion is even better for the overall product, because you know, you're now you're finishing on your most exciting part of your golf course, you know, and if you let's go back to August and now everybody laughed my comparison to gusta national and and and rightfully sod the gust.

recently that I found it. It was like maybe his second to last round of golf he had ever played. What really, Yeah, yeah, because it was towards the end of his life.

of golf media for students. He played one of his early designs also in New York. I think it's like green Finger State Park or something along the lines of that, and he took a picture of a green and I was like, oh my god, like, that's an amazing green. And I think, like, what's what's fascinating about the RTJ history is kind of how like his career was so long.

He he spanned so many generations of golf and just how the style like changed with the trends of society almost you know, his early career was working for these you know, the very the peak of the Golden Age, the end of the Golden Age. He survives the you know, he lives with the Great Depression, and then his early career starts and you see the flare of the Golden Age.

But then it became almost sanitized with society into the fifties, you know six you know, like and you just see that, and then it's like the you know what society became of, Like how can we just like pump out you know, the same products. You know, there's this I think about this all the time.

and there's just this great like I got it. The first thing I got when I got back to Chicago for a winter break was a small cheval burger if you go and you get like a burger and fries. And nowadays it's like, you know, it's like thirteen dollars for burger and fries or may fifteen dollars. But yeah, you know, it's gone up considerably. But the idea of a neighborhood burger stand where it was like your local burger stand, if you think about McDonald's, that is the

place that McDonald's made extinct. During the same era of golf design, like the trends of society went around, like how do you just like create like the same product

at a like large scale. And that might be part of why Robert Trent Jones And you know, there's a lot of reasons, and you could get into a lot of reasons why, but like part of why Robert Trent Jones golf courses became so almost monotonous in comparison to his early designs, as part of it was society norms pushing you know, almost against art in this period.

unique gem. Oh my goodness, But there's holes out there where I'm like, oh, there's our fourteen. You know, there's our old six, there's thirteen. And it would be a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller or a little bit different or but it was kind of a you know, a lot of there's a lot of similarities when it came to that. And I think when Jaeger came out here and suddenly we were like, we got

all of the greens approved to redo. And after the first three he did, everybody's like, oh my gosh, we got to do them all and thank god we had a little extra. You know, I didn't make this project about grass types. I wanted to reuse all the grass that we had during the project, all the fairway greens, Tea's approaches, we just reused it. It was a little

spotty or something. But so during that but I had budgeted the entire project with SOD, so that money alone covered us to do the added eight greens that we needed to do budget wise, And so suddenly we were off to the races. And then you're you know, Jaeger would pull up to a golf hole like our eleventh, right,

this is early. This is probably the fifth when he did, and it was our eleventh new number two and it's a par five and the screens kind of banks in their sideways and it's very you know, he could have done whatever he wanted in that stage. But the reality is he paid. You know, he sits there and looks at it. He's like, this is what should be there to gentle walk up to the green. It has a little fall off on the back left, it has a little right kicker. So he he made it just better.

He maximized its potential. But it's a very similar golfle like it hadn't changed much. We just got the fairway bunkers right. You know, he painted a mask, you know, everywhere he went. It's like a it's like a price is painting. You know, these guys are so talented, it's unbelievable. I always tell people it's like he's he's out here building prices paintings that my members are going to get the exercise on. Like how cool is that? You know, Like what are we doing out here? Like it's just

so good. And when you're looking at it and you're seeing the lines move, and you know, and and and his right hand man, Nick Mills, who comes from Australia, and you know, I can't wait to play Nick Mills golf course. I mean he's young in his career, but good god is he Yeah, the influence from the Australian golf, which I need to go see someday. You know, it would have been a much more Australian feel out there

if Nick had to say. But like, but you know, the two of them together, they really did a great job with the lines and carrying you through the property and just drawing interest to everything you're looking at while not changing certain things that much. Like eleven, twelve, thirteen are new, two, three, four, five, seven. A lot of those didn't change much, you know, like they got better, a lot better. But you know, there wasn't it wasn't like we needed to reinvent the wheel on those holes.

Some some we did, you know, the the re routing. The two new holes are new eight to nine, old seventeen eighteen. Those two are brand new golf holes. I would say, so is our new number one number old number ten. It's in the same place. But the green got pushed back twenty yards, brand new green. Much different

feel when you walk out into the property. But so like, you know, I don't know, you just kind of then he got to that back now and he made quite a few changes, but at the same time, like just improving what we already had there.

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first order at Best Day Brewing dot com. Uh, don't take my word for it. My personal pick to click is the coulsh uh. But they've got a lot of other ones. I really like the electro line too, So go to Best Day Brewing dot com thanks to them. And let's get back to Jason. How how important is the sequencing of where you start and end your project, like picking the places to start construction now that you look back on it.

meets legos, you're like, uh, okay, this is hard. Jager can't give you an engineered rendering of what it's going to look like until he's done with that gigantic bulldozer of a paintbrush, you know what I mean. So we ended up having to get to the clubhouse area in August to prep the area and give them what we thought was best for them to now build a new a new turn building. We have a new turn building, we have a future outdoor teaching like a golf practice center,

and then expanded patios and things of that nature. So like where we butt uped, all that was very strategic. We had to get that right and then get out of dodge and then come back and clean it up when they're done. So that was kind of forcing us to where we started and where we're going to end. But yeah, for us, we did. We did a soft close right, so we were July seventh, you know, second

week of June. Since then, it has been like gas pedal to the floor, drinking out of the fire hose, right, pulling an Oakmont there, I'm stealing Oakmont's drinking out of the fire hose. I mean, it has been game busters, just going like crazy. You know. We had to have our invitational back to back invitational club championships, you know, cram it all in there before we lost three holes. We took three holes at first. We made them right

around the maintenance facility. Was great because we were really inconvened, you know, it was very minimize inconvenience to our golfers. We kind of got to stay in this little footprint and bang out three of our golf holes right around the maintenance facility. That took about two weeks before we needed to start deconstructing. And you know, the deconstruction process is always a week or two, sometimes three four ahead of the construction. The sequencing of these projects is mind blowing.

You're like you you go in there and in a day, rich Lebar's army, all right, lgr Lebar Golfer Innovation's army comes out and they rip apart a golf hole. And what I mean by that is they take the sod off the green, put it on tarps. Oh, I got to keep this alive for two weeks on tarps two weeks max. Don't ever go longer than that. Then they take the sod and they flip it to something that's already the side from the faraway and the t's and

put that somewhere where it's already ready to go. So you have to have somewhere that's ready to lay the and then you just kind of rip out all the rough grass, take all the top soil, put that into a pile. Store that somewhere. Take the old bunker sand, get ready to reuse that for drainage, so put that somewhere else. It's it's very precise chaos. And then they're like, all right, Jaeger, here you go. And then he goes

and bulldozes it, and you're licking your chops. You're like, oh my gosh, this has turned out better than I thought it could be. And then it's two weeks of complete. You know, you scan it. That was our big thing. Scan it, all right, scan it, you know, Jagger would be a quarter of the way done with something. You'll scan it and anyways, then we scan it. That way we could put it back together with the light ar and and then it's two to three weeks of construction.

Like you have to rebuild the thing three times before it's done. It's maddening. It's maddening. You're like looking at it and your eye could vision just put sod on it. Oh wait, we need drainage, we need bunker liners, we need you know, we need to core out the green we need to and then we got to put it back together. They're just like the paper rush at it so oh mad name.

our grass and we're going to reuse it. What's what are the benefits and drawbacks to making a decision to reuse your grass? Grass?

to have Patterson Club. We had a lot of necessary things. We had a new irrigation system we needed, We needed to redo all the drainage. We needed to pore out the greens and get those things right. There was a lot of needs, and I didn't feel like Monostan was one of them. And also, you know, I always joke with people, I've never found a golf course. It didn't like, you know, I've never once played a golf course. I

was like, up, that was a miserable day. You know, this just doesn't happen unless you're got there miserable right, and then had a terrible burger. But anyway, never had a bad d and a golf course. So one of my I'm gonna tell a quick story here, one of my members take me to Ireland. A member guests in Ireland every year and dune bag and it was so much fun and man, good living. Well. One year we

went over to another golf course. He had just joined Hogshead and we took the airplane over there, and and about a couple of months beforehand, he goes, you know, Jay, he goes, what's with all these weeds in our native area? You know what's going on here? Like God, looks terrible. You know, when you're in the United States, it wants to be perfect, fine fescue and an inland parkland golf course which makes zero sense, right, can't have any weeds. It has to be just that. Then it has to

be just the rough, then just the fairways. Anyways, we go out to this other golf course in Ireland and I grabbed the bag from my cadde so I got to get out of here. I can't be here anymore. And he looks at me all confused. I go, they got weeds in their native areas. I'm out of here. I'm going back to the bar.

When I die, if I get a chance to play golf every day in the afterlife, it might be Borro If I had to pick one. I got sheep walking around. I have electric fences around the greens, and nothing's perfect, but everything's perfect, you know. So I don't know.

like the Patina exactly golf course. And one of I think the more disturbing trends in golf is like we we do these twenty five million dollar projects and they come out and it's had one hundred year old golf course, and you come out and you look at it and it looks brand new because it's all brand new, singular type of grass, and it's like you've actually lost You've lost the nature and the essence of the interconnectivity of what Bobby Jones and Jean Sarasen played on when and

the first year, you know, like you can at least say, you can say it's the same grass and a lot of clubs. What happened is that they have they've just swapped out grass and it's it's not an expensive line item, like you said, because you chose to keep the grass, is that had no issue there were it wasn't an issue because you chose to do that. You got to do eight new greens instead, which is going to make such a more bigger impact than a grass that over time is just going to become the same.

Long story short, I dropped off a container and he filled up container full of his cores when he was doing erification. And you know I bought got him a Colony pizza truck for his efforts. You know, the whole staff was out there. I think Lebar's staff was there during that time of year as well. We had a big pizza party for him allowing us to use his course.

We built three quarters of an acre of bn sorry wing Foot Poa greens nurseries before this project, knowing we needed to do expansions priceless right like right, we have this old beautiful grass and he's not that far away, so it's I would always hope it would become that over time. So you know that's when you come out here the first year, two years, you're gonna notice that

the grass doesn't match up exactly the whatever. You know, there's a little more poe on this screen than bent whooped dee do You got to get it in the hole, right, like, just get it in the hole.

that they always match. So is your hope then that over time that wing foot poa that you put in as part of your expansions will override the bent and you will effectively have the you know, yes, wingfoot poa greens at the Patterson Club.

I kind of went three to four inches of mix, minimal drainage, laid it down, rolled the snot out of it, keep rolling it, then start mowing it, top treuss it, whatever, and just get that stuff right. And then all of a sudden, Yeah, over time, if I get a if I'm out plugging out bad spots on greens when it comes to ballmarks or whatever, somebody spills of cocktail. You know, wing foot poets going in and then over time, Yeah, I mean, I don't promote seed heads, so I'm not

gonna be able to like overset it that way. But yeah, over time the poe will just slowly creep in there. And and I think somebody told me one time in college. They were like, this is back before all the growth regulators when it comes to controlling post seedheads. Was if you want, if you want perfect poe of greens, you basically you know, you see them benkrass and wait seven years you'll have it. But you know, there is something to say with these monostands. And I understand what people

are striving for. You know, when I was working at Caves Valley as a young sure like that was the hardest place to grow grass. Transition zones one of the hardest places grow grass in the country. And and you know you're on the fence. Do I do warm season? Do I do cool season grasses? And and having that that mono stand that kind of with stands, they heat better, less disease, it's better with disease. Pressure can be cut

a little lower. All that stuff is helpful. And you do see some you know, you do see the equality of golf is the quality of the turf, not necessarily the golf. It is noticeable at times, but it's not like, uh, you know again, it's still going to just kind of revert to what it naturally wants to be, you know, over time. You know, I always joke also with my brothers in Philly, right, Philadelphia Cricket Club, and they just do an amazing job over there when they did their renovation.

They went to one hundred percent mole of stands everywhere, you know. They they killed off the fairways, reseated them, rested all of their rough and then sat it out there. Creams approached his t's and you know, it's slowly over time, the poe is going to come in no matter what, and you don't notice it out there. Like it's been a while now since that work's been done, and it

feels as good as it did the date opened. So you know, I don't I don't see that much value in it either, you know, I really don't.

long stretch. And at the same time we had this feature coming up one in eight, which is now are going to be our ten and seventeenth and and I couldn't visualize what these guys were seeing. And I don't know if they had an idea what they were seeing yet, but I knew everybody needed a good night. A neighboring club, Reading Reading Country Club, brett chap and the superintendent there

hosted us that day. He said, Hey, come on out, I want to talk to you about our golf course, and you know, we'll have play some golf and have some dinner. So this is like the only day off we took all like throughout the entire time, you know, And we went over there and played some actually worked in the morning, but they went over there, played golf, had dinner, came back to what I have this big, large, old Booie turned into a fire like a fire pit.

It's really it's really cool. It's it's as cool as like as the Polish pyramids. But we had this set up between the old one in eight future ten seventeen, and you know, we had some adult beverages. We had tents set up. Zach Varney, the project manager from Labar, set up a little miniature tent in a bunker, so that bunker will forever be Zach's bunker. Steve Kabicki, our golf course superintendent here he set up underneath the tree,

similar tent underneath the tree. Jaeger and I ended up driving back to my airstream and I was like, you stay on that side of the airstream. I'll stand this side of the airstream. But yeah, we walked the property, had drank some adult beverages and laughed and talked and looked at what we had done and talked about what we should do. And that night I think again, I'm gonna take full credit to what might be the greatest surprise on property, which is that one in eight complex.

If you follow us on Instagram, you'll see some of the pictures have come out. Jaeger posted a couple. I've posted a couple. It's spectacular. It's like it's so good, and it used to be just two greens kind of butted up with like a fox hole in the middle where the fox hole kind of stopped the interaction of the two holes kind of playing together. So instead of butting up, one went six feet higher and slightly right and the other one, as you're playing it went slightly

lower and slightly right. So they kind of like are and intertwined with these really great bunkers. It's really great bunkering. And it might be the coolest surprise on the property. And it's our golf pro Chris Kenny called it that it's the best surprise that we've had so far. And I one hundred percent Nick Mills came up with this and I have to take full credit because it was on our camp out that that I'm taking full credit for. That idea came to came to existence, so and then

Yager plowed it into you know, painted in with his dozer. Gosh, so much fun, so much fun.

you in that project timeline infusing fun. And I think that's like, you know, the one of the hard things with anything, you know, you you as the superintendent, you're kind of you set the culture for you know, the the you know, outside of probably the weight staff at a club, the largest team at at a club, you set the culture and and it's important, you know, to know when you need to infuse something special or something

into something to lighten the mood. And I think these people having been on site, it's these projects, they it is just such a uh, it's such a grind day in day out, and if you don't lighten that mood, it it you know what you said, how do we have the most fun? That's where it can turn in terms of of I always imagine that you're at the

point you guys have done the raw construction work. And I always feel like if you're moving houses, you get done with all the big stuff and you're like, I'm almost done, But then you realize that you've got like just as much work with all the little stuff getting it into boxes. And the last is the seeming end of a move, is the worst part of the move.

What is it? What's left for you guys? Now that you've you've got all the construction done, the grass is down, What are the kind of finan final pieces you have to do before opening day? And what does that look like for you and your team?

Work that are going to kind of be last. So we will be you know, we'll be fighting it right to the very end, and then when we open up, we'll probably stuf have some other stuff to do. You know. One of the things I always joke with our members is I'm you know, my president might put a little choke collar on me right now because I'm usually used to annoying just my president or my grounds chair. But you know, I always joke with people that we're not

going to settle down. We're not going to let it rest. We're going right into what I call beyond the rough, so beyond the plane areas basically right, We're gonna do more rock art, We're gonna do more beehives, pollinator pathways. You know, how can we We want to do a little pumpkin gardens so I don't have to buy its defensive pumpkins every year, you know, right next to our nurseries. So there's endless work to be done after the project, but it's going to be a race to the end.

And then you know, we have this horse farm next door that's owned by the autubond and they have a life the horse farm has a lifetime lease, so you know, when that thing comes available someday down the road, that's our pollinator par three. And then we hope we can get a beach club someday. And you know, so it's long range planning is the name of the game, and just you know, just keeping everybody focused on the big

picture down the road. So I'll be distracting people with that while we're tying up the loose ends, getting ready to open up this golf course. But you're never done, You're never done.

Thank you to everybody who listened to their first episodes this year. Can't wait for twenty twenty six and to get back on the grind. I hope everybody has a great holiday season and a great, safe new year. We'll see you in twenty twenty six.