Around 6 p.m. Tuesday, text messages started flying among the pro-shop staff at Rose Creek Golf Club in Edmond, Okla. A powerful storm cell was nearing the greater Oklahoma City area, and the timing was less than ideal. On Wednesday, hundreds of members and their guests were set to descend on Rose Creek for the first day of the club’s biggest event of the year, the Golden Rose Invitational.
The front looked bad on the radar but when it arrived it looked, felt and sounded even worse, with winds north of 50 mph and hail the likes of which club workers had never seen. Some stones were the size of golf balls, others the circumference of a baseball. The icy projectiles were wreaking havoc all over the vicinity — shattering windshields, smashing roof shingles — and it quickly became evident that Rose Creek would not be spared.
“It looked like it was snowing,” assistant pro Hannah Torres told GOLF.com Thursday morning.
Indeed, such was the volume and ferocity of the hail that it created near-white-out conditions.
The storm lasted only five or 10 minutes but the damage had been done. When club workers emerged from the clubhouse and maintenance buildings back out to the course, they found the greens pocked with a seemingly infinite number of hail-stone-sized craters, some with the stones still plugged into the turf. The club no longer had putting surfaces; it had 18 blocks of Swiss cheese. “Our greens were pretty much destroyed,” Torres said.
But the club also had something else: a plan.
After talking through options, club officials decided to ask for assistance — by way of texts to members and calls to action on social media. “Within 20 minutes we had people storming in wanting to help,” Torres said of the scene at the club early Wednesday morning. Members poured in. Friends of members. Even grounds-crew workers from other clubs, armed with rollers and other machinery. The army of volunteers soon ballooned to more than 200, fueling what has to be one of the most intensive hail-repair efforts the game has ever seen.
Some helpers brought their own ball-mark repair tools and putters; others used tools supplied by the club. At least a few volunteers, concerned by the amount of bending that would be required, attached repair tools to the end of PVC piping. Instead of dividing and conquering the greens, the team thought it best to tackle one at a time. They started on 18 and worked backward: bend, lift, flatten, repeat, bend, lift, flatten, repeat. It’s impossible to say how many hail marks required repairing but these photo suggests that the total number easily would have climbed into the hundreds of thousands.
