Over the summer I did my internship at Chartwell Golf and Country Club under Superintendent Matt Earheart and Charlie Gregorski the First Assistant. A typical day for me consisted of starting either at 5:30 a.m. on the weekends or 6:00 a.m. during the week and starting my first job, which always varied. Some of these jobs would include: walk mowing greens, tri-plexing greens, tri-plexing tees, mowing fairways, rolling greens behind walk mowers, prepping greens for the day with water in the morning, and using a TDR to find the areas on the greens that didn’t get enough water the night before, afternoon watering to cool greens off during the hotter days of summer, backpack spraying native areas with a herbicide mixture to make way for the hard fescue seed we planned on spreading to improve border areas making them more playable, GPS spraying all playing surfaces, or general labor around the course and pool area.
I enjoyed every job that was given to me over the summer, being able to see the end product after I completed the task. Examples of this included: mowing strait lines on a green and striping them perfectly, completely killing a desired area of turf and watching the stages of how the chemical worked its way through the plant, getting ball speeds up from rolling greens, and watching members putts roll 10 feet past the hole and off the front of the green, or helping Charlie with irrigation and changing the throw areas of certain heads to either fix over saturated spots or dry spots change overnight.
I had many enjoyable experiences over the summer in this internship. One of these memories was our employee golf tournament that’s held towards the end of the summer where employees from all departments get together for a 9-hole best ball team tournament which we finished second place in scoring two under par. Another was fishing in our pond during lunch or after work. One unexpected thing that occurred was when we were walk mowing greens one morning and Josh, another employee that graduated from Severna Park High School and is now starting his first semester at Nebraska University, was pulling a walk mower off the trailer and unbeknownst to us the drain plug for the oil backed itself out and began leaking oil all over the approach of our number three hole. Another time was when our beer cart girl accidentally got the beer cart full of products high centered on a curb near number 11 and we had to proceed to get our tractor to pull her off of the curb before it either went down the embankment towards the pond or flipped completely over.
If I were to rate my internship experience under Matt Earheart at Chartwell Golf and Country Club, I would rate it a 10/10. I would highly recommend anyone at the University of Maryland in the Turf Grass Management program or in the Golf Course Management program to contact him if they are looking for an internship or a job in general. I learned a lot over the summer from both Matt and Charlie. My confidence was boosted, by reading chemical labels and mixing tanks and using and tracking spray applications in the John Deere spray rig. As well I improved my Spanish both speaking and comprehending. Overall it was a very instructive summer which I will remember for the rest of my life.
