St Andrews trusted Toro maintenance equipment to maintain ‘the home of golf’ for the 150th Open. And ahead of and throughout the week-long tournament in July 2022 distributor Reesink Turfcare was called upon to provide set-up procedure training to ensure consistency in after-cut appearance.  

 

Reesink provided five days of Cutting Technology training before the tournament as well as specialist technical staff on site throughout the tournament to support the team using a fleet of battery-powered mowers and riding greens mowers.

 

After-cut appearance training was vital to ensuring the perfect finish across the different courses as Stephen Terreblanche, technical trainer at Reesink Turfcare, explains: “The training was to prepare the team for the Open competition. But more than that, it was to achieve consistency in set-up procedures across all the different courses at St Andrews.

 

“To get the course ready and keep up with maintenance while the tournament was taking place multiple machines were being operated by different members of the turf professional team at the same time on a single green, and the cut delivered by each machine had to be perfect and consistent across all the machines in the fleet.

 

“To achieve this the machines had to be set up the same way to avoid different after-cut appearance issues, which would be easily visible if machines with different set-up adjustments were operated side-by-side.”

 

It was by all accounts a successful investment as the machines proved on the world stage how a golf course can use battery power and riding greens mowers to sustainably achieve ideal playing conditions to test the best golfers in the sport.

 

Reesink’s range of training courses are designed to be delivered on the customers’ premises and give the team the training it needs to ensure they can operate the chosen machinery safely and efficiently in an environment they are familiar with for the best possible results. (Disclaimer: This isn’t specific to world tournaments!)