In Their Own Words - SofTrak Greens January 06, 2006

A Conversation with Danny Little

VersaSport International, LLC (http://www.versasport.com/) (SofTrak Greens) was originally founded in 1998 by Lance Pierce. At the time the company was founded, Lance was a mechanical engineer with Boeing in Wichita, Kansas. He was an avid golfer and he began looking for alternative ideas for a business he could start. Danny Little was a bank president in a small town in southwest Missouri. Danny was an avid golfer as well. Danny became frustrated losing five dollar bets to his golf buddies and decided he was going to do something about it. Danny started to research synthetic greens and came across SofTrak. Lance personally installed Danny’s green and a friendship resulted. Danny became so enthralled with the product that he opened his own SofTrak dealership and hired a couple of people to work for him. Together, Lance and Danny invested in a new building for the home office in Wichita. Soon thereafter, Danny purchased a controlling interest in the company with Lance remaining as the company’s president. Danny admits it’s a corny story…he liked the product so much he bought the company.

SofTrak currently has 70 dealers located across the United States and internationally. They have a dealer in Asia, two dealers in Europe, a dealer in Canada and a dealer was just added in the Virgin Islands.

Casey / Q:
Tell me, Danny, about the technology used in your greens system.

Danny / A:
SofTrak uses a slightly softer version of turf than many of our competitors use. It has certain advantages and certain disadvantages but we think the overall advantages outweigh the disadvantages. It takes a little while longer for the turf itself to get up to speed when it is first installed. It will take a little bit more rolling initially, but, we think the final product is better. We use a 5700 denier yarn - that basically has to do with the thickness of the turf - and that turf has less memory than what a thicker version of the product which is basically a 7600 denier that most of the rest of the industry uses. Again, it takes a longer rolling process to get the tips to lie over and to get the memory to stay in place. If you roll it just once it will tend to pop back up. If you roll it twice it will stay down longer and so on. The other types of yarns might bend over and stay bent over so consequently, over time, the green will roll faster and faster. The 7600 denier greens are easy to roll and get up to speed initially, but, over time, at least with our experience and experiments with that type of turf, eventually, they get too fast. With the 5700 denier product, a softer material that doesn’t have quite as much memory, it will tend to be more adjustable. If you want a faster speed you can roll it more often. If you want it to slow up you can brush it and it will tend to keep its speed down a little bit.

Casey / Q:
So the speed is adjustable, like on a natural turf green?

Danny / A:
The speed is easily adjustable between a nine and eleven on the Stimpmeter. The nice thing about it is you can get it to roll as fast as you want or you can slow it up if you want to. To slow up the green you just run a soft bristle brush against it. You can make it emulate a Bermuda green if you want to. If you want a little more grain in the product you can broom it up a little bit. If you want it to react like a fast Bent grass green you just need to roll it a few time before you putt.

Casey / Q:
What are the critical elements to a synthetic green?

Danny / A:
The most critical part of green design and green building is the in-fill. To my knowledge, we are the only in-fill putting green vendor in the world that uses a proprietary in-fill product that the dealers are required to use in whatever SofTrak putting green that they install. Many of the companies will allow the dealers to acquire their own in-fill locally so there’s no consistency between one green and another. A green installed by a company in California will putt differently and take shots differently than one installed in Minnesota, for example. All of our in-fill material comes out of one plant location in Texas. It’s specifically graded to a certain size module so that all the in-fill materials are uniform and clean so it will not pack hard and compress over time. Some companies just use whatever local sand they can put their hands on which tends to be angular in nature and so it will compact and get hard over time. In the early days of the industry that was one of the most common complaints about in-fill greens; that they would be very nice for the first few months but then they would get hard as concrete over time so if you hit a ball in to them the ball would bounce just like it was a concrete surface.