Ice Damage

Here's a picture from this winter in front of 6 green.  We had a deep line hydrant break and ran water into this sump and it froze as you see here.  This next picture is what that area looks like now.  It is pretty apparent that there is some ice damage that occurred around the edges of this frozen pond especially right up next to the path (just above my dog in the pic).  We rarely have ice damage in this climate but in other areas of the country it can be devastating if certain conditions exist.  The interesting thing is that you see the middle of the pond is undamaged because it was under water.  Apparently the grass was able to breathe enough under water but not under the ice cover near the edge of the pond.
This particular area has a large percentage of rye because it is chronically wet and receives a lot of traffic from carts as they exit the fairway.  Both of those conditions favor ryegrass over bluegrass, but ryegrass is much more susceptible to ice damage than bluegrass.  So this is an interesting turfgrass ecology lesson as each species finds its niche in certain microenvironments on the course.  If you look closely at other low areas that might hold water and ice during the winter you will see that they are almost purely bluegrass since over the years the rye has been killed by ice. This area will probably receive some seed in a couple of weeks and recovery should happen fairly quickly because there are some surviving bluegrass plants that should fill in the voids.