How the GEO Foundation makes the game of golf more sustainable
Every time folks think they’ve wrapped their heads around the scope of transformation here at municipally owned Corica Park Golf Course (in Alameda, Calif.), there’s another spasm of revitalization and innovation—all of it sustainable, none of it a burden to taxpayers.
In March, the 45-hole facility rechristened the North Course, the subject of a renovation from Robert Trent Jones, Jr. The architect, based in nearby Palo Alto, equipped this 98-year-old track with drought-tolerant Santa Ana Bermudagrass—a hybrid that goes dormant in winter—minimizing water usage, while creating superior year-round playability. Reconstruction of the bunkers included harvesting and deploying artificial turf from the old Oakland Raiders practice facility. The course repurposed sand and soil from excavations at nearby building sites, “capping” all 18 holes with 6-12 inches of sand (40,000 tons) for better water retention and drainage capability.
Later this year, the facility hopes to achieve sustainability certification from the GEO Foundation for Sustainable Golf. As recently as 2012, the entire facility struggled with cost overruns, its courses in disrepair. Today, under the leadership of Greenway Golf Associates, it’s a national model.
“We’re on a 50-year lease—a ground lease, which gives us time to thoughtfully invest in the facility and transform this wonderful property into a vital asset that benefits the entire community,” says Umesh Patel, CEO of Greenway Golf, the third-party operator at Corica Park GC.
Farming out course operations to third parties is neither new nor innovative. But giving said operator a 50-year window to realize its vision and turn a profit in the process? That is different, and it made all the difference in the East Bay. The timeframe is the key enabler, in fact. Some third-party operators may have a 10-year contract with a municipality, but most are 3-5 years. In that scenario, all too often, brief engagement windows make profits even more unrealistic. Typically, municipal operators resort to austerity measures to make the numbers work.
“If we succeed,” Patel explains, “we have 50 years to implement our vision. When you give managers or operators 3 years, they don’t have the luxury of doing what they might choose to do, all things being equal. How is a private company with a 3-year lease going to make meaningful investments? By cutting costs and not fixing anything… With a 50-year horizon (now it’s 40 years), all parties are served when that vision includes running a sustainable business, in a sustainable way.
“This is open greenspace, and we play golf here. The majority of our time is dedicated to golf—but what else can we do to ensure the land serves the entire community? Access to space and sport creates great opportunities to foster sustainability and provide access to outdoor recreation and other activities for everyone.”
For their environmental and sustainability work, Greenway and the team at Corica Park GC are working with the GEO Foundation, the international not-for-profit based in North Berwick, Scotland. The programs GEO provides are being deployed worldwide, from municipally-owned outfits like Corica Park to private clubs to professional tours. For example, the PGA Tour works with the GEO Foundation to help foster a substantive sustainability commitment across its operations, including its network of TPC facilities.
Greening The Green
Founded nearly 20 years ago as a pioneer in what has become the sport and sustainability movement, GEO (www.sustainable.golf) is dedicated to helping the golf industry navigate and embrace sustainability across the amateur and professional game by providing strategies, industry-wide solutions, and a credible certification label. Some golf-centered environmental programs concentrate on the course alone. GEO Certified® status is achieved by the entire facility operation.
The foundation is also dedicated to what founder and Executive Director Jonathan Smith calls “a comprehensive, credible and innovative approach to sustainability, via tailored platforms accessible to golf facilities of all types – all aimed at making sustainability more practical and impactful.” GEO partners with national and regional golf associations, professional tours and tournaments, and even individual professional players.
GEO Certified® courses are not certified by the foundation itself. Instead, a separate arm of the organization makes the determination, based on essential findings from independent verifiers who visit the property.
The first step at Corica Park, and the first step toward facility certification, was going through checklists of course-maintenance operations for both the North and South courses, plus the 9-hole executive course. Again, GEO doesn’t certify courses, but rather entire facilities. So, this benchmarking process extends to the clubhouse operation, too, inclusive of the food and beverage department. According to Patel, it also helped the Corica Park team see all the good work that was already being done and spot ideas for the future.
It’s a worthwhile undertaking, says Smith, to understand how facilities are currently performing. Once that information has been added to GEO’s OnCourse dashboard, golf facilities can more easily see where they can reduce resource consumption—and cost—and add more value to nature and adjacent communities. The program also comes with an annual Sustainable Golf Scorecard report, which captures key data and trends in colorful charts and infographics.
“GEO’s analytical dashboard is amazing, how it measures, monitors, and monetizes all these practices,” Patel says. “We don’t expect to be perfect on day one, but we’re starting this journey, and the people at GEO have proved to be wonderful sounding boards. They have decades of experience in golf. They are amazing partners for us. They’ve already guided us in other best practices and have a blueprint they have refined and evolved over decades—one we could never develop internally, ever. We are really looking forward to taking the next steps.”
The foundation advocates for a golf facility’s sustainability in three major areas: nature, resource management, and community. In each respect, Greenway and Corica Park have made sustainable headway well before certification. “We tend to look at things in a slightly different way,” Patel says. “At the same time as we want to ensure our golfers get the best playing conditions, we also want to find innovative ways to use our open greenspace.”
For example, after launching a pilot program in May 2024 to mark Mental Health Awareness Month, the Corica team now offers year-round, well-being workshops aimed at activating the golf course as a space for mental health and relaxation. Expert practitioners lead sessions in art therapy, music therapy, and mindful movement, including yoga. All this takes place in a secluded private practice area on the 9-hole executive course and other communal spaces across the facility.
These curated workshops are designed to offer community members the chance to reconnect with nature, unwind, and find balance outdoors—benefits that golfers enjoy every day. In June, Corica Park will host its fifth annual On The Green Summer Camp for underserved youth, provided at completely no cost and including meals and transport for over 200 kids. To date, the program has provided more than 10,000 hours of outdoor recreation to boys and girls who lack access to outdoor recreation; it has served roughly 8,000 meals during the summer months when the school lunch programs many rely upon are not available.
These are examples of sustainable community. Other initiatives are more recognizably golf- and environment-centered, but always with a twist. Like replacing concrete cart paths with 100 tons of crushed, biodegradable, upcycled walnut shells. Think gravel paths, only topped with walnut hulls.
“Nearly 6 billion pounds of hull waste are generated every year in California alone, with limited practical application. By diverting secondary agricultural byproduct to create an ecologically sustainable cart path surface, we're working to reduce our carbon footprint,” Patel says. “We experimented with shell grinds and cart path depth on holes 15 and 16 of the South Course in order to determine final specs. All 36 holes of the North and South courses are now lined with walnut shells. We are exploring natural sealants to bind the surface, as we continue to refine the application.”
A Sustainable Twist
Greenway Golf Associates started out, early in the millennium, as a contract course-maintenance company that moved into project work, renovations, and eventually third-party course management. At its peak, the firm managed more than a dozen courses, some private, some municipal. By 2007, the courses at Corica Park were in poor condition after many years of deferred capital/maintenance investment. Eventually, the city put out an RFP to solicit third-party management proposals, and Greenway responded with an ambitious plan to revitalize the property—and rebuild both the South and North courses in the bargain. With the security of a 25-year lease, the South-Course renovation proved rather astounding. Rees Jones delivered a firm, fast Australian Sand Belt homage, and East Bay golfers flocked to play it.
Patel, an investment fund manager by trade, was not involved in this first phase. At all. But he lived nearby, and soon his kids began playing at Corica Park. He was smitten.
“I was blown away as to what the South Course had become,” says Patel, who was particularly taken with the new, underground system that captures and stores all rainfall, irrigation, and urban run-off for future course use (a system that has been significantly enlarged with renovation of the North Course). “I didn’t know about the Rees Jones renovation. I’d seen the prior course for 20 years, and now it was this magnificent new course minutes from my house.
“Greenway and Rees had built this amazing environmental asset. Both courses are very close to the water table. They raised the entire South Course 4 feet! Something we eventually had to do on the North, too.”
How best to deploy both assets? At Corica Park, the answer seems to be daily-fee, public-access, everyday golf of a very high quality at an affordable price
But always with a sustainable twist. Again, at this writing, Corica Park GC has not yet applied to become GEO Certified®, but Greenway has already amassed a sizeable, quite ingenious track record on this front. During renovation of the North Course, it did indeed repurpose artificial turf from the Oakland Raiders’ former practice facility to line the bottom of RTJ Jr.’s new bunkers. When the Oakland Roots, the city’s USL Championship soccer team, built a new, natural-turf pitch, Corica took 2,900 artificial-turf panels and used them to build the walls of Scottish-style revetted bunkers on the North.
When Greenway sand-capped the North Course, it did more than repurpose sand and soil. Because Corica Park is located much closer to the building sites than the normal dump sites, the carbon footprint of the sand-bearing trucks was substantially reduced.
In 2023, Corica Park dedicated the equivalent of 30 acres of non-golfing greenspace to actively nurture biodiversity. Greenway Golf’s new sustainability manager is slowly transforming these spaces with new pollinator habitats that nurture critical wildlife. As one example, the facility hosted an educational event with Pollinator Posse, a nonprofit dedicated to creating meaningful space for pollinators in Northern California. As part of the event, the facility’s Sundays On The Green youth program learned about the critical role of pollinators and hit clay balls filled with wildflower seeds off the first tee of the executive nine—into a newly created protected habitat.
Up next: a holistic regenerative landscaping plan (soil testing, water testing, development of baseline metrics), which will help identify and prepare key sites on the entire property for all future plantings.
Overall, since construction of the North Course commenced, Greenway has removed exotics and incorporated native keystone plants to nurture habitat for 103 species of identified birds, pollinators, and other wildlife. The operator is also knee-deep in its exploration of biochar—the flaky, jet-black stuff that gathers at the bottom of a gas grill—as a carbon-rich soil amendment.
“These 3,400 municipal courses [in the U.S.] are precious gems,” Patel says, sounding nothing like an investment manager. “They came before these cities did, originally built on the edges of these population centers. We’re very close to the airport here. But the cities often grew up around them, so these courses represent valuable open greenspace that must be preserved and used by the whole community.
“Since reopening the South Course, we’ve seen a huge new traffic in birds. Then, three years ago, a pair of bald eagles came and built a nest. We have a gentleman who lives next door, a birdwatcher and photographer, who wanted to take pictures. We said, ‘Of course.’ Now he leads bird walks out there, and they’ve identified over 100 bird species.”
