These robots work day and night to ensure Philadelphia Cricket Club’s grass is perfect for the PGA Tour’s visit

If you’re lucky enough to play a round of golf at the Philadelphia Cricket Club, you aren’t going to see many of the large, drivable lawn mowers on the rough grass.

Instead of the loud noise from those massive, gas-powered machines, you’ll hear the light hum of the course’s autonomous electric mowers, which look more like your Roomba than a traditional lawn mower.

The Cricket Club, the nation’s oldest country club, has found itself on the forefront of golf course innovation, as the first course in the nation to adopt autonomous mowers as part of its workflow.

“It has given you a 24-hour mowing window, which we never had before with traditional labor,” said Daniel Meersman, director of fields and facilities at the Cricket Club. “We can mow at night. We can mow during the day. They’re electric, so they’re really quiet. They’re small units, so they’re very discreet. It’s almost like a squirrel or a small animal being in the distance. You don’t really notice it much, and you don’t care, and you hit your shot.”

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Meersman and the Cricket Club first tested out the Husqvarna robotic mowers before COVID-19. At the time, they weren’t even thinking about them for the golf course, just playing around with them on the activity fields for the club’s summer camp to see if they worked.

But once the pandemic hit, that field suddenly became the centerpiece of the club’s programming. The ability to mow the field quietly, and overnight, was invaluable. Meersman decided to bring one home with him, to test out how it would work in different weather conditions. Seeing it calmly buzz around in his backyard around a group of deer, Meersman, who said he wants to make the golf experience feel like being in a national park, realized there was potential for the new mowers on the course.

“The deer didn’t care that it was back there, and they weren’t distracted by it or scared by it,” Meersman said. “I just said to myself, ‘Wow, if these deer don’t care that this mower is mowing, golfers surely aren’t going to care if it’s mowing.’ That was when I started to do the math of, how many mowers do I need to do a golf course?”

The answer? More than 30, which now do about 85% of the mowing in the rough on the Cricket Club’s two golf courses, including the Wissahickon course that will host the PGA Tour’s Truist Championship from May 8-11.

So far, the mowers are only used on the rough, outside of the fairways and putting greens. Meersman, who speaks at conferences and teaches other clubs how to implement the technology, said the autonomous mowers have not led to any staff reductions among the grounds crew. Instead, they have freed up the workers to focus on other tasks — like divot filling, rerolling grass on the greens, and clearing away bunker sand — that they might otherwise get to less frequently.

Those improvements also have a greater impact on the experience for golfers, who benefit from improved conditions on the greens and fairways throughout the day, not just for early-morning tee times. The tech also keeps the grounds crew staff safer on days with wet conditions, keeping the workers off the steeper hills where accidents can occur. It also allows them to hone new skills beyond cutting the lawn, leading to more career advancement opportunities.

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For the most part, the club members love the new technology, thanks to the improved conditions and the quiet. But they do occasionally block a shot or two.

“It’s the trade-off to have perfect conditions all day, every day,” Meersman said. “You might have to wait 20 seconds for it to move out of your way once or twice a season, if one gets too close to you. But that’s the trade-off for having perfect conditions on your golf course all year long. Golfers will take that trade-off 100 times out of 100.”

As the technology on the mowers improves, the Cricket Club is experimenting with potentially using the autonomous technology on the greens and fairways. But right now, they’re not as skilled with lower-cut grass.

The success of the mowers led Meersman and his team to explore additional ways to add autonomous technology to their workflow. The lines on the club tennis courts are now painted autonomously, and the club uses drone sprayers for pesticides on the native areas, to avoid creating tire marks and to keep humans away from the spray.

“On one hand, we’re the oldest country club in the United States,” Meersman said. “But on the other hand, we’re probably one of the more forefront people in the country with technology.”