Darrell Marcinek, CGCS, the director of golf maintenance for the Somerset (N.J.) County Park Commission (center), poses behind the River-Friendly sign at Warrenbrook Golf Course. Photo courtesy of Darrell Marcinek
All five golf courses in the Somerset County (N.J.) Parks Commission portfolio are certified participants in the River-Friendly Program, and all five proudly display their River-Friendly status prominently, but they all took different paths to get there.
“As (program administrators) went to each course, they set specific goals for each course,” explains Darrell Marcinek, CGCS, the commission’s director of golf maintenance and a 33-year GCSAA member. “There are different goals based
on topography or features. It started at Quail Brook. They set a whole bunch of goals for the golf course specific to Quail Brook. One of those goals was to naturalize some areas, and we built a rain garden. Then it spread to Neshanic Valley, and
after that to the other three.”
Marcinek says lessons learned at one could be applied to the next, so before long, all five courses under his watch — Quail Brook, Neshanic Valley, Green Knoll, Spooky Brook and Warrenbrook, sprinkled throughout the county just west of Staten Island,
N.Y. — earned their River-Friendly certification. There are just two other, non-Somerset County Parks Commission courses to have been certified, though three more are listed as “in-progress participants.”
“A lot of it was practices we were doing already,” says Marcinek, who started with the commission as grow-in superintendent at Neshanic Valley in 2002 and became its director in 2006. “We just had to document it. They come back every
three years to look at things. Sometimes they’ll find something. At Warrenbrook, we’re still trying to get our washdown recycling system. That’s been a goal for seven years. It’s our only course that doesn’t have one.
We set goals every three years. There’s still stuff to do.”
The River-Friendly Program is a joint partnership of the Watershed Institute, the New Jersey Water Supply Authority and Raritan Headwaters Association, plus program affiliate Rahway River Watershed Association. The River-Friendly Program focuses on four
areas: water quality management, water conservation, wildlife habitat enhancement, and education and outreach.
It has segments for businesses, schools, residents, community partners and, yes, golf courses.
Marcinek says the far-flung nature of the commission’s five courses added to the challenge.
“We have five golf courses on five different sites,” he says. “One’s up in the mountains. It’s heavily treed. It was harder to find areas to naturalize than it was at Neshanic, where we already had 75 acres of naturalized
areas. (At Warrenbrook) there’s a shopping center parking lot that drains into one irrigation pond. We don’t have that challenge at any other courses.
“But most of our practices, our watering practices, our plant-protectant practices, are the same everywhere. We hand-water as much as we can and use wetting agents everywhere. Around the clubhouses, we put rain barrels everywhere. Once we had some
ideas for the first one, Quail Brook, we tried to install them at the other courses to make it easier for the superintendent.”
If the process sounds a lot like that of the Audubon International’s Cooperative Sanctuary certification, it is, as Marcinek well knows.
Two commission courses — Neshanic Valley and Quail Brook — have Audubon certification, which “has been a goal of mine forever,” Marcinek says.
“There are some similarities,” he says. “It’s the right thing to do, and we were doing most of it anyway, so we decided to document it and boast about it. We’re not overstaffed, but we have the staff and resources to take
the time to do it. We have time in the winter, in the off months, to document what we’re doing. Being a county, municipal … we’re heavily scrutinized all the time anyway.
“And the majority of our golfers appreciate it. We found out early on that we were a little overzealous in naturalizing some areas, and we had to scale that back, but it all has been well received. We have signs — monarch (butterfly) signs,
river-friendly signs — all over the golf courses. We pushed environmentalism at times, and they tolerated it, and they’re proud of it.”
Andrew Hartsock is GCM’s editor-in-chief.