Bill Doyle
| Correspondent
Donny Carter worked on golf course maintenance at private country clubs for more than three decades, but he’s enjoying the change of scenery as the new superintendent at Green Hill Municipal Golf Course.
“It’s like I came home,” he said. “I came back to Central Mass.”
It’s only a 20-minute drive from his home in Sterling near Sterling National CC to Green Hill. Carter, 55, was hired as superintendent the first week of November after working at Pine Brook Country Club, a private club in Weston, for the previous 23 years, including the last five as superintendent.
“I should have done this 10 years ago,” he said. “Expectations are different. Less pressure.”
Carter will try hard to please the golfers at Green Hill, an 18-hole, city-owned public course, but he expects them to be less demanding than the members were at the exclusive, private courses where he worked. He already has the greens rolling fast at Green Hill, but he joked that the fairways at Pine Brook may have rolled even faster.
“All you want to make sure of is that the greens are smooth and consistent,” he said, “and they track.”
The 6-foot-1 Carter intends to make an impact in his new job. He has already cleared trees and brush. He plans to expand all of the greens to create more possible pin placements and make them less symmetrical. He intends to aerify and roll the sand dams that have developed around the edges of the greens from years of top dressing. Eliminating the sand dams will allow the rain to drain off the greens easier.
He also plans to shrink the size of some fairways and mow the tee boxes so they point straighter toward the fairways.
Carter said early in the season is the best time to do all this work because the grass isn’t growing yet. He expects it to take less than a year for the expanded areas on the greens to mature.
Carter also plans to cut fairways half an inch high and the rough two inches high to speed up play so golfers can finish in four hours or less.
“I want them to enjoy themselves,” he said.
“His vision of how the golf course should be maintained,” head pro Matt Moison said, “is a proper and thoughtful vision.”
Green Hill used to have red flags in the cups cut in the front of the greens, white flags in the middle and blue flags in the back. Carter plans to have all yellow flags on the greens.
“It’s old school,” he said. “Back in the day, they didn’t have three colored flags. They just had one color.”
Carter has enjoyed working with Moison and assistant pro Matt Strzepa.
“They’re just easy to work with,” he said. “When I first came here, I had a lot of questions, and he (Moison) was awesome. He had a lot of answers, he’s a wealth of information. The young Matt is a good kid, too.”
“I have been very pleased with our interactions,” Moison said. “I find Donny to be competent, capable and proactive in his approach to the golf course.”
Moison has worked with several superintendents during his 29 seasons as head pro. Prior to Carter, all were first-year superintendents except for Vince Gilmartin, who left after a few months when he was promoted by BrightView, then called ValleyCrest. BrightView has a contract with the city to maintain the golf course. Carter replaced Tim O’Brien, who left after four years as superintendent.
Carter knew he wanted to be a golf course superintendent when he was 14. At the time, Holden Hills CC awarded junior memberships to youths who worked on the maintenance crew for two weeks. So he did.
“I got the bug raking leaves,” he said.
Carter grew up in Sterling and learned to play golf by playing with his father at Grandview GC in Leominster.
In 1988, he graduated from Wachusett Regional where he played on the golf team as a freshman. Golf coach Ron Spakauskas was his chemistry teacher.
The summers after his junior and senior years at Wachusett, he worked in maintenance at the International in Bolton under superintendent Ron Milenski. Then he earned a degree in turf grass management at UMass-Stockbridge.
While a freshman at UMass-Stockbridge, he served an internship at Oak Hill CC in Fitchburg from April through August.
After graduating from UMass-Stockbridge, he returned to the International to work for Milenski for a year. Then he served as assistant superintendent at Nashawtuc CC in Concord for nine years in the 1990s when the club hosted Champions Tour events. He enjoyed meeting such Champions Tour legends as Chi Chi Rodriguez and Lee Trevino.
“It was a lot of fun,” he said. “Most of those guys were real friendly, real nice guys, salt of the earth.”
One year, five-time Champions Tour winner Tom Wargo offered to change the cups on the practice green, and Carter let him do it.
Former Yankees pitcher Ralph Terry played on the Champions Tour, and he asked Carter to caddie for him at Nashawtuc because he knew the course so well.
“My boss wouldn’t let me,” Carter said. “I think it would have been something pretty cool.”
Carter joined the crew at Sterling National CC for a couple of years before he moved on to Pine Brook CC, a private member-owned country club with a golf course, pool and tennis courts. In the middle of July last year, he decided to leave Pine Brook.
Carter usually worked from 4 or 4:30 a.m. until 5:30 or 6 p.m. seven days a week from March through November.
“They demanded a lot, but they supported you,” he said. “I’ve got nothing bad to say, but I just got to a point where I couldn’t do it anymore. I was burnt out. I was cooked. I had to walk away.”
Carter said his job at Pine Brook was “intense” because the members demanded perfection.
“They used to call it ‘the Grass Museum,’ ” Carter said, “because everything had to be perfect. There’s not like a grass out of place.”
So what should Green Hill’s nickname be?
“It could be the funhouse or the jewel of Central Mass.,” he said. “I would like that to be. There’s a lot of character here.”
When Carter left Pine Brook, he expected to take the rest of the summer off, but a week later, Tatnuck CC superintendent Craig Resley asked him to help him out, and he worked part time there through the end of October. Resley had worked for Carter at Pine Brook. Carter also worked part time at Merrimack Valley Golf Club in Methuen after he received another call.
A chemical company vendor with whom Carter has worked told him about the opening at Green Hill and urged him to apply to BrightView for the position. He was hired soon afterward.
“I’m really enjoying this,” he said. “This gave me the fire back in my belly again. It’s been a while since I felt that way.”
At Green Hill, he plans to work six days a week from 5 a.m. until 1 p.m. He’ll also spend parts of two days a week overseeing Dudley Hill Golf Club in Dudley, another course that BrightView maintains.
“It’s challenging, but in a good way,” he said. “I don’t mind it at all.”
At Pine Brook, he golfed only four or five times a year, but he played quite a bit last summer, including at Wachusett and Juniper Hill and Worcester CC. He has a 9 handicap.
“I’ve gotten much better,” said.
His two lead assistants at Green Hill are Colin McCarthy and Tyler Fichtel, who are back from last year. He’d like to set the same kind of example that his past supervisors have for him.
“I’ve worked for a lot of great mentors,” he said. “They’ve made me into what I am today. I’m very well rounded. I’ll always be indebted to them for that.”
Carter has a son Harrison, 27, of West Boylston and a daughter Sydney, 25, of Marlborough, and he lives in Sterling with his wife Amy.
Story ideal, comments welcome
This golf column returns for another year. You can suggest story ideas by reaching me at the email listed below. Comments are also welcome.
—Contact Bill Doyle at bcdoyle15@charter.net.
