SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — As KELOLAND is dealing with another shot of snow, local golf courses are longing for warmer weather.

A year ago, Elmwood Golf Course was brown but playable.

This March, the fairways and greens are covered in a thick blanket of snow.

“Technically, we look at our season as April 1st to October 31st, anything before or after that we call gravy, free golf,” Sioux Falls Golf Assistant General Manager Cat Clark said.

Sioux Falls Golf Assistant GM Cat Clark says there’s been plenty of gravy to go around in recent years.

“We’ve been very fortunate to be open the last three years at the beginning of March. This is more of a normal year, probably, but not normal in the recent last couple years,” Clark said.

The snow will eventually melt. Until then, Prairie Green, Kuehn Park, and Elmwood will play the waiting game.

“We don’t really know what’s under there. We got that ice storm early on before the snow when winter started, so just looking to see what’s under there and hopefully it’s gone soon,” Clark said.

“The snow cover is good. We’ve been dry the last couple years. We’re glad to see the moisture and we feel that course conditions should be pretty good come spring,” Sioux Falls Golf Regional Superintendent Norm Parsons said.

Norm Parsons is the Sioux Falls Golf Regional Superintendent. He says the process of preserving the courses started before the first snowfall.

“We’ll top dress the greens, we put a little layer of sand on them to help protect them and then we put down a fungicide application to help protect us from snow mold,” Parsons said.

Elmwood will be the first course to open due to its 27 holes of continuous cart path and GPS that keeps the carts in place. The question is, when?

“When it’s dry enough and conditions are allowable for people to play or traffic on the golf course we’ll get open,” Parsons said.

“We’ll see what happens, but we get five good days it could melt pretty fast as we saw last week so we got a good head start,” Clark said.

If Mother Nature starts to cooperate, Clark says Sioux Falls Golf hopes to have its courses open before the end of March.