Bench Notes › Turf
The Overseed Transition and the Fortnight Nothing Sits Right
Twice a year, for about two weeks each time, the surface your ball sits on around here is neither of the two things it is supposed to be. Nobody announces it, most players never learn the vocabulary for it, and the result is a fortnight of golf that feels like a technical collapse and is nothing of the kind.
Why the fairway changes species at all
The warm-season grasses that survive a New Mexico summer, kikuyu and bermuda mostly, go dormant when the nights get cold. Dormant is not dead, but it is brown and it is thin, and courses that want green fairways through the winter oversow ryegrass into them in early October.
The rye germinates in a week or so and carries the course through until the weather warms up. Then in late April or May the warm-season base wakes up, starts competing, and the rye gets weakened deliberately so the base can take back over. Two handovers a year, each one taking one to three weeks depending on how the weather cooperates.
Both handovers produce the same thing underfoot: a surface with two grasses in it at different stages, sitting at different heights, with bare patches between them.
What that does to a lie
During a clean rye winter, the ball sits up on a dense, upright, fine-bladed canopy. During a settled kikuyu summer, the ball sits down into a thick coarse mat that grabs a hosel. Both are consistent, both can be fitted for, and a player learns them.
In transition you get both in the same fairway, ten yards apart, with no visual difference worth mentioning. One lie sits up and the next is on hardpan between clumps. The club that behaved well on the first is entirely wrong on the second.
| Surface state | Ball position in the canopy | What a sole meets |
|---|---|---|
| Established rye, Dec to Mar | Sitting up, level | Even resistance, predictable entry |
| Spring transition, Apr to May | Alternating up and bare | Two entirely different entries, unpredictably |
| Established kikuyu, Jun to Sep | Sitting down in a coarse mat | High grabbing resistance, especially at the heel |
| Autumn overseed, Oct | Thin, seed-topped, patchy | Low resistance over firm ground. Leading edge digs |
The two clubs that expose it
The fairway wood. This is my end of the bench and it is where transition does the most damage. A three-wood off the deck depends almost entirely on the leading edge finding the ball before it finds the ground, and the whole club is designed around a specific relationship between the sole camber and the surface. On an autumn overseed lie, where the canopy is thin over firm dirt, a fairway wood with a rounded, generous camber suddenly presents its leading edge much closer to the ground than it did in September.
The miss is a thin shot that goes forty yards and stays down. Players read it as a lift, or as hitting up, and start making swing changes in the second week of October that they will spend all winter undoing.
The pitching wedge on a half shot. Same story from the other direction. A partial wedge into a bare patch between clumps has almost nothing under the ball, and the leading edge arrives at bare dirt with the sole carrying nothing.
How to tell it is the turf and not you. The pattern is inconsistent rather than directional. A swing fault produces the same miss repeatedly. A transition lie produces a good shot, then a shocking one, then two good ones, with no change in feel between them. If your bad shots have stopped clustering, look down.
What we tell people to do
Do not get fitted during a transition week. This is the practical reason the note exists. Our own strip transitions in the same weeks the courses do, and a fitting taken on a surface that will not exist in a fortnight is a fitting built on noise. We will tell you when we think the strip is unrepresentative and offer to move you.
Play a club that tolerates both. For the fairway wood specifically, this is the argument for a slightly more forgiving head and a slightly higher-launching setup than the one you would choose in a settled month. You give up a little on your best lie to stop losing a shot a round on your worst.
Take one more club and swing softer. The most reliable in-round adjustment during the handover, because it reduces the consequence of catching a bare lie without demanding a technique change under pressure.
When it happens
Autumn overseed goes in around the first ten days of October at most courses in the valley, and the surface is usually settled by the start of November. Courses on the West Mesa tend to run a week later and take a week longer, because the nights turn cold sooner up there.
Spring transition is looser. It depends on when the warm-season base decides to wake up, which is a soil temperature question and varies by a fortnight from one year to the next. Late April in a warm spring, the third week of May in a cold one, and it is patchier and lasts longer than the autumn handover.
The upside
If you can only get to the bench a couple of times, the settled weeks are the good ones and there are plenty of them. Late February through the end of March, on established rye, is the single best fitting window we get all year: firm underneath, even canopy, mild air, and no wind until the afternoon. Late September is the second best.
Related: what the summer monsoon does to the same ground, and fairway wood sessions, which we run on grass for exactly this reason.