Turf

Cheyenne Country Club Golf Course Cheyenne, Wyo. • 6,547 yards (back tees) • 5,224 yards (forward tees) • Par 72 • 6,062 feet (elevation of Cheyenne) • 61,537 (population of Cheyenne) www.cheyennecountryclub.com The Cheyenne Country Club has six par 5s, six par 4s and six par 3s. wanted me to learn from the ground up and that's what I did. "At 19 years old, you have a deer in the headlights look when you get on a project like that. John let me make mistakes, and I learned from those mistakes. I wouldn't say he was always patient with me, but he was very fair." After that Whalen, then a burly 6-feet-2 and 270 pounds, moved with Landscapes Unlimited to another construction site doing renovation jobs in Myrtle Beach, N.C. Whalen became assistant superintendent at Pine Valley Country Club in Wilmington, N.C., after leaving Landscapes Unlimited. "I made it there for about a year until a hurricane came through," Whalen said. "Having been from Wyoming I had never been around anything like that. I decided to hightail it to Texas." He worked as an irrigation technician for the city of Lake Arlington Golf Club before going to college. Whalen chose to attend Northeastern Junior College in Sterling, Colo. He graduated with an Associate's of Applied Science degree in horticulture with an emphasis in turf grass management in 2002. Melissa Stults, another NJC graduate with a degree in horticulture, also married him that year. With degree in hand, Whalen became a superintendent in Glenwood, Iowa, and then moved to Haxtun, Colo., in 2004, where he ran the F & H Golf Course. In 2007, he left Haxtun for Wyoming. "I learned one thing in Glenwood—growing turf grass in the transition zone is extremely hard. In the middle of one summer, I lost two greens. "Glenwood taught me how to run a nine-hole golf course without a big budget," Whalen said. "Me and another guy—it was extremely hands-on. We did a lot of things in-house. "When I got to Haxtun I helped run tournaments—me and another guy running a nine-hole golf course again. Not a big budget. You figure out how to get things done without a lot of money. "Those two jobs prepared me for what essentially I have here in Cheyenne. I have a bigger staff here, more machinery, more money, but I always spend the club's money like it's mine—very frugally and not a lot of big-ticket items. Try to keep it minimal. It's a no-frills budget for me really. "I'd rather spend money and hire good employees than do things on the course that I don't think is necessary." Not the Number of the Beast The Cheyenne Country Club has six par 5s, six par 4s and six par 3s. "You don't see it much anymore where it's six, six and six," Whalen said. "That's probably the most unique thing people say about the course. And we're par 72." Whalen has six full-time employees including himself, and that number swells to as many as 14 in the summer. Whalen has two sons, Liam, 6, and Grady, 4. His family's two labs, Sterling, 11, and Libby, 4, are very familiar on the course. Sterling was a pup while driving around with Whalen in a cart in Iowa. "She's been able to have free rein at any golf course I've ever been at," Whalen said. "She likes to lounge around the office and make sure no retail guys come in uninvited." Herbert Lockwood designed the course built in 1971. The semi-private course has a smorgasbord of grasses on the fairways with Kentucky Bluegrass, perennial rye, some bentgrass and fescue and primarily bentgrass with Poa on the greens. "Fescue seems to do better in a drought situation," Whalen said. "So we started interseeding more fescue with our ryegrass in the summertime. It seems to help. We're trying to conserve on water. You can use fescue to minimize what you do on the golf course." Going forward Whalen hopes to have all fescue and rye. "We don't have a lot of Poa in our fairways, but we do have some," he said. "We've been able to establish a lot of rye grass and fescue in the last five years. We're doing a better job preparing for winter now than five years ago." In the last two years, Whalen has used the GenNext Complete A & B fertilizer. "I haven't sprayed any fungicides on the greens period," he said. "I used to get Anthracnose in July and part of August. Spring 2014 19

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