Playing On Temporary Greens With Arccos

Course maintenance is a critical part of ensuring that courses are in great shape for every golfer. There is the general etiquette that should always be observed such as filling divots and repairing ball marks–but there are also seasonal schedules that the greenkeepers need to fulfil in order to ensure a better experience throughout the year. 

While the idea of putting on a plinko board of aerated greens makes many golfers cringe–golf courses aerate their greens for four major reasons, all of which affect turf health. Aeration is usually performed in order to remove organic matter, decompress the soil, improve the drainage of the soil, and help promote strong root growth. Because greens receive so much foot traffic, it's important for many courses to protect them during colder months, particularly in Northern regions. 

One of the other solutions to ensuring the health of these precious surfaces is creating temporary greens for the off-season. Temporary greens can be necessary when greens are damaged or under repair, but they can also be used to protect perfectly healthy greens when they are extremely vulnerable due to environmental factors. 

Cold weather market golfers are all too familiar with temporary greens during winter when usually their course is shortened to a temporary tee box and a makeshift green at the end of the fairway. This is not a one-size-fits-all situation, but some courses opt to close the primary greens in favour of temporary greens for a variety of reasons. At the heart of it, many superintendents feel that keeping traffic off the greens while the grass is growing slowly, or not at all, is the best way to protect one of the most valued assets of the facility.

Using Arccos with Temporary Greens

While the greens maintenance of the aeration process doesn’t affect your experience while using Arccos, temporary greens change the design of the course and can affect how the app will operate during play. 

With the detailed course maps in Arccos, we have identified the terrains from tee box to greens. The introduction of temporary greens will affect front/centre/back rangefinder distances by showing the distances for the normal/primary greens. To get proper distances to the temporary greens, it is best to tap the aerial map in the app to drag the rangefinder distance to where the temporary green is located in order to get a more accurate distance reading.  

If you enjoy using the A.I. Caddie recommendations in the Arccos App, despite being a super computer caddie, it won’t know you are playing on a temporary green. Our A.I. Caddie recommendations are mapped to the normal/primary greens as well, so we recommend using the rangefinder advice from above. 

Hole Switching
Hole switching is reliant on stepping foot on a mapped green, so temporary greens may cause hole switching issues. If you come across a temp green during play, putt the hole out on the temp green, then make sure to manually switch to the next hole by swiping over in the Arccos app and pressing ‘Play Hole’ before you hit your next tee shot. This will ensure that you don't get incorrect shots tracked from other holes, particularly on tighter courses with side by side fairways. 

Want your home course updated with a proper course map with current temporary green layouts? Send us an email at starter@arccosgolf.com with an app image or satellite view of the hole(s), with the temporary green locations drawn on top. 

How Temporary Greens Affect Your Play

Temporary greens might be unpopular, but they’re used for good reason. If you are trying to post your scores there are a number of rules you should research or discuss with your authorised association to see if it is possible and if you are following the correct procedures (ie: Recording Scores for Handicap Purposes While Playing on Temporary Greens or Tees)

If you are just trying to keep the cobwebs from forming on your game and are excited to still be playing, then just enjoy your time out on the course, and simply practice putting at home. We double-checked our data to see if players who continuously played throughout the off season were better-off the following year, and the correlation was less related to seasonality and more related to ‘better players just play more golf’. But if it’s a nice winter day outside… you should definitely capitalise on getting out there, because you can't get better without playing and practicing more!