South Carolina drought being felt on Grand Strand golf courses

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. (WBTW) — Heavy rains earlier this week came as a relief to Chris Gentile, assistant superintendent at Prestwick Country Club in Myrtle Beach.

With many parts of Horry County still facing extreme drought conditions, Gentile said working to keep the course hydrated is always a concern — although it’s designed to pull from several water sources.

“We have two large water sources that we’re able to pump from, so we were able to run our irrigation to keep the golf course nice and green which our golfers expect when they come to play here,” he said.

And while Prestwick’s groundskeepers are grateful for their existing water supply, Gentile said another month or two without any precipitation would have begun to affect operations.

Key areas of greens may have been watered less, and it would have been done by hand more often to control amounts.

“We can also use wetting agents that allow us to hold on to some of the water that we’re using,” Gentile said.

While every golf course is different, Gentile says he has heard of other courses not having the same amount of luck with water.

He says some places have had to scale back their water supply and only water the key areas such as the greens.

“We’re fortunate here to have the water that we do have and a lot of courses in the area don’t have that, and they’ve had to scale back some of their water right now. So everybody’s breathing in a sigh of relief right now that we got this rain that we just got yesterday,” he said.

Gentile says many golfers would go in the mornings so it would not be as hot while they are playing.

With the excessive heat and little rain, Gentile says golfers did not have any restrictions such as having to stay on the cart path, but with the heavy rain they do now.

“They’ve been able to ride the entire course without restrictions and today we are cart-path only with the rain that we got yesterday, but it soaks it up really good, it needed it, so we got a nice deep water in yesterday and it broke up that surface tension.”

Gentile says the pond where they get some of their water from did lower from the lack of rain but filled back up with the recent rain.

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Hannah Huffstickler is a multimedia journalist at News13. She joined the News13 team in January 2024 after graduating from Coastal Carolina University in December of 2023. Keep up with Hannah on Facebook , X, formerly Twitter , and Instagram . You can also read more of her work here .

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