Yorkshire volunteers who played their part in the Open

It is a scorecard wrecker for any player whose tee shot lands in the face of it and cascades agonisingly all the way down to the bottom.

After several attempts to free the ball from the suffocating sand, the golfer, his caddie and his entourage will move on.

No rearranging of that cavernous sand for them.

That job falls to one of the 52 bunker rakers assigned to each group during Open week – among them two greenkeepers from Yorkshire.

Andy Unwin (Rotherham) and Richard Holmes (Crosland Heath) spent the Open Championship cleaning up after other golfers. It may not sound glamorous but for club greenkeepers this is the pinnacle.

A week inside the ropes with the best golfers in the world; watching them, learning from them, playing a small part in golf’s oldest major.

Their roles do not just end though at bunker raking. On the Friday for instance, Unwin set his alarm for 3.15am to be at the course before dawn to help mow the putting greens.

There are 104 bunkers at Sandwich, two fewer than when the tournament was held here eight years ago, when the sand traps were visited 1,123 times by the players. The record is 1,585 visits to the 185 bunkers at Royal Lytham and St Anne’s in 2001. So take your bucket and spade for next year’s Open on the West coast.

Collating the statistics falls to Scott MacCalum from the British and International Golf Greenkeepers’ Association (BIGGA), the headquarters of which is based at Aldwark Manor, York.

“We get applications from all over the country and even internationally to work the bunkers at an Open,” says MacCalum. “We have people from Slovakia and Sweden working this year. It’s a great privilege for them and something to relish.”

The application process for Open bunker rakers begins in January.

Outside the ropes, and tasked with keeping the thousands of fans up to date with scores from around the course, are the teenagers who work the massive leaderboards.

And the most seasoned group dotted around Royal St George’s involves Giggleswick School, near Settle, North Yorkshire.

This Open was the school’s 24th consecutive year providing a leaderboard team. Next year their 25th appearance will coincide with the school’s 500th anniversary.

Thirty people from the school worked Open week – six members of staff and 24 pupils, aged between 16 and 18.

And if Unwin, Holmes and the bunker rakers think they have it tough – and they do – the Giggleswick gang began their days at 4.30am on Thursday and Friday, and were not back at their Sandwich hostel until 9.30pm.

Sorting the scores for 71 players on Saturday and Sunday was a doddle having managed the numbers for 156 on the first two days of the tournament.

The children and their teachers work one-hour on, one-hour off.

They operate the hole-by-hole scoreboard in the tented village and the leaderboard by its side, plus the nine-hole scoreboard at one of the food outposts around the course, and the leaderboard by the driving range.

“We were described in the scorers’ headquarters as the A-team,” announces Giggleswick teacher James Giles proudly.

Giggleswick’s association with the Open goes back to 1988, Seve Ballesteros’s third and final win.

Back then, scores were calculated and relayed around the course to the scorers via radio, before being transferred onto a computer print out.

Now, a nifty little handheld control helps the team keep the punters informed.

The school got involved via the trusty old network of a friend of a friend with Dorothy Lambert the chief co-ordinator and ever since the busy pupils of Giggleswick have been as much a feature of the Open as the grandstands, waterproofs and BIGGA.