At Burstwick, we operate a policy where hedgehog wheels must be used by anyone using a trolley in the winter months. This is to help protect the course, but I am often asked by golfers if they actually work, or in some cases, can they actually hurt the course more?

This conversation happens a lot so I wanted to perform a visual experiment which helps people understand the difference between trolleys with smooth wheels, trolleys with hedgehog wheels, and finally, carrying only. So to do this I walked 7.2 miles. Why? I wanted to simulate a busy weekend’s worth of traffic over a single area, with all three scenarios.

I placed six stakes in pairs, 12 metres away from each other, and then walked up and down these runs 300 times (150 up, 150 down). With all three runs I purposely didn’t keep going over the exact same lines, I spread the wear over a width of roughly one yard. These reason for doing it in this fashion is to demonstrate what happens on the course in high traffic areas such as sides of tees, around edges of lakes and bunkers etc where everyone takes the shortest route to wherever they need to get to, and on any given weekend we can have around 300 golfers play so that number represents realistic footfall.

Each run of 150 laps took me around 45 mins and a few cappuccinos for fuel, but the results were definitely worth it!

The experiment showed the predicted results, trolleys with smooth wheels create the most damage, hedgehog wheels were created about 30% less damage, but the carrying (which is something people will have heard me bleet on about a lot in winter) is by FAR the best for the course - it created about 80% less damage of the smooth wheels!

What a lot of people don’t realise (and this shows it perfectly), is the main thing that causes damage is ANY contact with the turf. The amount of weight (which most people think is what does the damage) is a very small factor, it’s actually the surface area which is touched, because just pressing the grass down even with a light weight, means it needs energy to spring back and repair itself, so by touching a much smaller area of grass (the size of your feet only vs feet and wheels) creates MUCH less damage.

A study from the USGA showed that the amount of turf area covered in a typical round of golf is as follows:

Carrying - 119m²
Two Wheel Trolley (smooth wheels) - 1,199m²

That is 10 times the amount of area covered! So 10 people carrying their bags will produce approximately the same amount of damage as one trolley with smooth wheels.

We are now going to monitor the recovery of each area over the coming days and weeks to see how long lasting the damage is from each of the three methods, and continue to take photo evidence, then we will produce the full analysis, so keep your eye out on our news blog for another article coming soon!