Going to Golf Sustainability School at the University of Georgia

America’s university-affiliated golf courses occupy a special place in the sport’s history. For many avid players they conjure visions of taking on a layout that’s as highly ranked as the higher education system its serves. The course at Yale University comes to mind. Perhaps Stanford. The University of Michigan’s course. Taconic at Williams College. And many others. Some are private, some are public, all are revered.

The University of Georgia Golf Course in Athens is public through and through, operated as part of the school’s auxiliary services department and open to students, faculty, staff, alumni, and anyone else who pays the reasonable greens fee and nabs a tee time. Ranked No. 26 among college courses in 2022 by GolfWeek, it’s a beautiful challenge, originally designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr. in 1968 and updated by Love Golf Design in 2006.

In March of this year, UGA Golf Course earned its Audubon International Cooperative Sanctuary for Golf Certification — a goal long in coming after years of sustainability strides on the part of the agronomy staff and the University as a whole.

“I’ve been working on it for many, many years,” says Scott Griffith, CGCS Director of Agronomy, a past president of the Georgia chapter of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, and a current national GCSAA board member. “I’ve been piecemealing it together here and there, and we finally made the push and got across the finish line.”

As warmer temperatures kicked in across northern Georgia in mid-June after an unseasonably cool spring, Griffith — an Alabama native who came on as UGC’s Director of Agronomy in 2006 after serving as an assistant at Atlanta Athletic Club — was gearing up for the Georgia Golf Course Superintendent Association fundraiser, which UGA has hosted for more than a decade. “We have 132 people come and play,” Griffith said. “If we could host 200, we would have 200 sign up for that event. It’s always really popular and we always have a waiting list for it.”

UGA has also hosted two women’s NCAA championship, the Men’s NCAA Regional Tournaments in 2012, multiple regional tournaments, and, for going on 55 years, the Liz Murphey Collegiate Classic.

But this is the first time UGA will host any of these events with its ACSP for Golf Certification in play. It’s testament to Griffith and his staff staying the sustainability course. They’d employed strong environmentally friendly practices for years and just needed to document what they’d done to earn certification.

“It’s just something that I always wanted to do here,” he said. “The environmental component is a part of what we do. It really was easier for us to fit into that mold because we were not a subdivision golf course. We weren’t a very high-end facility that wanted everything manicured to absolute ‘T.’ So it presented us opportunities to fit in that realm. And anytime the University of Georgia can have positive publicity when it comes to things like that, we just eat that stuff up. We love doing the right thing.”

They were ahead of the game in several respects. “We already had buffers around our ponds, buffers are around our waterways … a lot of the things that we needed to check the boxes for certification were already in place.”

Just one detail remained to finalize their certification: shoring up their wash pad area.

“We had been wanting to do something, sitting on our hands about whether or not we put a recycle system in,” Griffith added. It looked like we didn’t have the funding, but an opportunity came to get a partial grant from the FairWays Foundation to build a bioswale. Once we got that completed, that kind of finished off everything.”

The stewardship efforts continue. Griffith has joined Audubon International’s Monarchs in the Rough program, planting various kinds of milkweed from Georgia State Botanical Gardens to give the endangered butterflies habitat for laying eggs without attracting too many hungry deer —the course welcomes several herds and teems with other fauna and flora. “We’ve always had a lot of wildlife on the course. Again, it was just a matter of documenting it all.”

Education is a big part of UGA’s golf operations, as well. Students make up most of Griffith’s agronomy staff, working parttime to augment their studies.

“I usually have one to two turf grass students. If they’re in the turf grass program at Georgia, they’re automatically hired. I help them obtain internships, mentor them as best I can to get them moving on. Overall, 80 percent of our staff is made up of students.”

As current and future students learn the ins and outs of sustainable golf course maintenance and care under Griffith’s direction, he and his staff will keep striving to up UGA’s stewardship game. He’s also a practicing beekeeper, which only sweetens his course’s environmental possibilities.

“We’ve got a good base. We will expand pollinator plots, expand monarch butterfly habitats, put in more hives. Once I feel comfortable enough, maybe we’ll pull a little honey off them and share it with our food services to help tout what we’re doing.”

With Audubon International’s powerful, neutral, third-party, science-driven guidance, UGA Golf Course can now count itself a leader in the sustainable college course canon, but Griffith wants to score even higher grades across the board.

“We’re providing jobs for students, we’re helping researchers, whether on the business side or the agronomic side. There’s a lot of things we do within our mission that don’t have anything to do necessarily with golf. But we’ll keep growing the things that we’ve already planted.”

To learn more about how your local golf course can gain recognition for your environmental efforts and learn how to expand your initiatives through Audubon International’s numerous environmental certifications, visit www.auduboninternational.org.

Audubon International, an environmentally focused nonprofit organization, offers members numerous certifications and conservation initiatives to protect the areas where we live, work, and play. Their certifications are designed to increase environmental awareness, encourage sustainable environmental efforts, and educate both their members and their communities.