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Ask any golf course superintendent what the toughest aspects of their job are and near the top of any list would be 1) staying within their budget and 2) managing golfers’ lofty expectations.
To help supers deliver on both of those responsibilities (while also helping them making their courses more sustainable), the USGA has released new tools that allow courses to better track their water usage and green conditions. The USGA Moisture Meter was released last week at the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America annual trade show in San Diego, and Golf Digest got an early look at how the tech will help superintendents.
“The moisture meter is a great way to check for soil moisture with advanced technology, mainly used on putting greens, but also a great way to characterize your entire golf course,” said Jordan Booth, the USGA’s senior director of course consulting.
Kyle LaFerriere
By better understanding the moisture levels in the soil, courses can cut down on water usage by making data-driven decisions about watering instead of a best guess.
“ If you feel like the grass is dry or needs water, that’s a subjective thing. But if I tell you to water anything under 16 percent, then all of a sudden, we’re speaking the same language,” Booth said.
Yet moisture meters have been popular within the industry for over a decade. What makes the USGA’s tool unique is that it integrates with its DEACON platform, a software that digitally tracks the precise location of every moisture reading (among other metrics) across every location on the entire course. Instead of deciding to water every green on the course, for example, the moisture meter and the DEACON app will tell supers which greens and which specific spots need water and which don’t, allowing them to more efficiently manage labor and water usage.
The app is also integrated with the USGA’s GS3 smart ball, first released in 2023 and used at each of the USGA’s 15 championships to measure putting green speed, firmness, smoothness and trueness. At first sight, the high-tech ball looks like a kid’s bouncy ball found in any arcade claw machine. Yet by dropping them on the green and rolling them down a Stimpmeter, the GS3 provides crucial data that makes them among the most significant innovations in green technology since the Stimpmeter itself.
USGA/Kyle LaFerriere
By arming superintendents with data on firmness, smoothness and trueness, the USGA hopes to stop a decades-long race to achieve the fastest green speeds possible.
“ For a long time, we’ve characterized greens by speed, and that’s turned into an arms race of how fast can we get,” Booth said. “That’s not a great thing for resource inputs, playability and architecture balanced with speed. We’ve learned a lot of this through our championships, and we’ve learned some hard lessons.”
By dropping the GS3 ball from a specified height, courses can measure how firm their greens are, as shown here at the U.S. Open – USGA/John Mummert
Instead of focusing solely on achieving maximum speed, the USGA, through the moisture meter and GS3 ball, are emphasizing the importance of green firmness—which often enhances approach shot strategy—and smoothness and trueness of roll. “Smoothness we characterize as any kind of up and down movement the ball might experience in a roll, and then trueness would be side to side deviation,” Booth said.
Paired together, the new moisture meter and GS3 ball record all of their readings using Bluetooth and GPS technology that uploads to the DEACON app, so all of the information is in one place. Not only is this important for maintenance staff, but when superintendents receive complaints from members and green committees, they now how the objective data to know whether a complaint about the greens is valid or not.
Should a member complain that the greens have been bumpy, for example, supers using the GS3 ball and DEACON can show whether or not the course has been meeting their ideal smoothness and trueness numbers.
“ We’re giving golfers and golf course superintendents these metrics to hopefully make them better resource managers and more importantly, better communicators,” Booth said. “We’re not just judging ourselves by speed. We’re judging ourselves by all these important metrics.”
The moisture meter, GS3 ball and DEACON platform are all part of the USGA’s 15-30 initiative announced in 2023 in which the organization is committing $30 million over the next 15 years to help courses reduce their water usage. Though the USGA sells these products directly to courses, all of the money raised from the new tools is being reinvested into further research and development, all in an effort to make our courses more sustainable.
And helping to cut costs and manage member relations? Well, that doesn’t hurt either.
Main Image: Supplied
