Municipal Golf Courses Are Shifting Gears

Dear Community Golf Fan,

Welcome to Reading the Green 2016 Vol.1; the four times a year, golf related brief, that focuses on improving the viability of Local Government owned golf facilities. Staples Golf Resource Group is a design and development consultancy that has served communities like yours for the past 14 years.

The purpose of our communication is to afford you an informed perspective in the areas of Industry Trends, Creative Usage for Golf Facilities, and Resource Management. Cities, counties, and park districts that are looking to make their courses more viable through master planning, renovation projects, and irrigation improvements have found our perspectives helpful.Community Links White Paper Preview

Our much anticipated Community Links White Paper, where Staples Golf will showcase our lessons learned from municipally owned golf facilities, is getting very close to release. Two small stats from our recent participation survey at Rockwind Community Links in Hobbs, NM, which we find very interesting are:1.) When asked of Golfers whom had kids or grand-kids whether they were more likely to bring them to a Community Links facility over their old facility, 96.1% said yes, while only 3.9% said no.

2.) When asked of Non-Golfers whether they were more likely to give golf a try since first visiting their Community Links facility, 90.9% said yes, while only 9.1% said no.

More interesting stats such as participation rates, facility ratings, changed senses of pride, Non-Golfers' feelings toward the city's investment in their Community Links, as well as approaches for implementation, will be found in the white paper. Please click here to ensure you get your copy when it's released!USGA Symposium to Feature Community Links

This coming Tuesday and Wednesday, January 19th-20th, the USGA will be presenting the 2016 Pace and Innovation Symposium. The event will bring together industry leaders to discuss and share solutions to improve the pace of play at golf courses, as well make the game overall more enjoyable.

Andy Staples, ASGCA, will be presenting on the Community Links concept with Hobbs, NM, City Manager J.J. Murphy, who was instrumental in bringing the concept to south eastern New Mexico. The administrative process to implement a Community Links and the impacts it's having on the city will be discussed.

This session will be of particular interest to administrators looking for a case study in how to increase a golf facility's viability, and is at 1:45pm PST on Wednesday the 20th. Click Herefor a full schedule of the symposium's events!

Sustainability and resource management will also be discussed, making this event worth while for any course owner/ operator. Sessions will be streamed live online, but you MUST BE REGISTERED TO VIEW; Click Here to register and to receive the webinar link. (A convenient option to automatically add to your calendar will present itself.)

A Case for More Tees

A big push in the golf industry as of late, and something that local government golf facilities should be paying attention to if they haven't already, is the implementation of a more forward set of tees; sometimes referred express tees or scoring tees.

The idea behind this set of tees is to not only increase the pace of play for an average round of golf, but to match a set of tees with a more appropriate swing speed while making potential women golfers feel more welcome at the same time. You may say "But we are already have women's tees!" And we believe you! But this effort is allowing courses to get new women and beginners to enjoy the same golf course as those of a more accomplished skill.

Here's a great pdf by the PGA of America on how to set up your course to bring in more new women and beginner golfers; Setting up Golf Courses for Success.

If any of these thoughts have you thinking of forwarding this email, please do so and cc us in the process. Great decisions start with open ended dialog amongst willing parties. Let’s start a positive, open dialog today. Sincerely,  

Andy Staples, ASGCA
Founder, President, Staples Golf Resource Group