Home / Archive / Glut of Green
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Feature: May 2007
Glut of Green
Golfers see wider options while courses see narrower margins
Story by Bob Burns
Before Brad Bell started designing golf courses for a living, he played golf professionally on the PGA Tour. His father, Bob Bell, a well-known figure in Sacramento golf circles, served as chairman of the Raley’s Senior Gold Rush tournament. Brad’s wife, Shannon, was an excellent player herself.
Golf is obviously a big part of Brad’s life. But he is also the father of two sports-minded boys, and that’s where things get complicated.
Rushing home from work one recent afternoon, a man whose livelihood depends on people playing his golf courses voiced a lament that spoke to the state of Sacramento golf and the state of the game in today’s time-challenged society.
“It’s difficult for people my age, with children, to play a lot of golf,” Bell says. “I mean, my dad was a great dad, but he played golf every weekend when I was a kid. I didn’t think anything about it. When I was about 14, I started joining him.
“But it’s a different animal today. I’m off to baseball practice, and then it’s on to basketball practice. And I sure don’t remember having as much homework as my kids have. It’s kind of hard to justify going off on my own and playing a lot of golf.”
In many respects, Sacramento golf has never been healthier. There are dozens of new courses to play. The weather is conducive to playing year-round. More juniors and women are taking up the game. Last summer, Del Paso Country Club, Sacramento’s oldest private club, unveiled its remodeled course to strong reviews.
“I think we more than doubled the number of courses in a 10-year time frame.
The population certainly didn’t double.”
— Ken Morton Sr., head pro, Haggin Oaks Golf Complex
And the Capital Region is producing a spate of talented young players, including LPGA star Natalie Gulbis and up-and-coming PGA Tour pro Nick Watney. St. Francis High School won another state championship.
But the reservations expressed by Bell can be heard around the region, and they’re not unique to Sacramento. The golf construction boom of the 1990s has skidded to a virtual halt. The National Golf Foundation reported that there were fewer courses in the United States at the end of 2006 than a year earlier.
Sacramento didn’t lose any courses last year, but business could be better. The market is oversaturated.
“I think we more than doubled the number of courses in a 10-year time frame,” says Ken Morton Sr., the head pro at the Haggin Oaks Golf Complex. “The population certainly didn’t double.”
Locally, there are 54 courses in the area bounded by Lodi to the south, Woodland and Davis to the west, Marysville and Yuba City to the north and Placerville to the east, according to the Northern California Golf Association 2007 course directory.
Of those 54 courses, 23 were built since 1990. Almost overnight, the Sacramento region went from not having enough golf courses to having a surplus.
As a result, few if any courses are seeing the number of rounds they’d like. Haggin Oaks had about 55,000 rounds last year. That figure was closer to 100,000 rounds in the 1980s.
But in the early 1990s, “high-end daily fee” courses started sprouting across the horizon. A wealth of attractive new courses — Catta Verdera Country Club, Teal Bend Golf Club, DarkHorse Golf Club, Empire Ranch Golf Club, Lincoln Hills Golf Club, Lockeford Springs Golf Course, Whitney Oaks Golf Club, Turkey Creek Golf Club, Wildhorse Golf Club, The Ridge Golf Club, WildHawk Golf Club and Woodcreek Golf Club — boasted about offering country club conditions at rates in the $45 to $70 range.
Bell designed three of the new public courses: Teal Bend, Turkey Creek and Empire Ranch.
“It’s a tough market,” Bell says. “At Teal Bend, the business model was for rounds to really ramp up for the first years and then stay there. In fact, it did the opposite. But the current level is fine. They’re making money. They don’t rake it in, but they’re humming along.”
Private clubs multiplied as well. Serrano Country Club in El Dorado Hills and Granite Bay Golf Club in Placer County were built to serve an affluent population of golfers, to cite two notable examples.
But most private clubs now have a waiting list of people wanting to get out — not get in.
“It’s a horrific golf market – it’s overbuilt,” says Kyle Phillips, the golf architect who remodeled the course for Del Paso Country Club and designed the Granite Bay course. “You’re struggling for members. Everyone has vacancies.
“From a player’s standpoint, it’s great,” Phillips says. “If you’re an owner, it’s lousy.”
Bob Kunz, the general manager of the Granite Bay club, admits that the influx of quality public courses put the squeeze on private clubs such as his. Granite Bay’s golf memberships are sold out at 475, but there is a “resale” list of people wanting to sell their memberships.
“I think demand is beginning to catch up to supply,” Kunz says. “Back around 2000, there was quite an inventory, but we’ve been on an upward trend the last couple of years. I see the next couple of years being strong.”
Local courses are banking on demographics to pull them out of their slump. Arms are open, eagerly awaiting an influx of retired baby boomers.
“As we move into the era of retiring baby boomers, more seniors will be playing weekday rounds,” Haggin Oaks’ Morton says. “We don’t have trouble getting people to play on the weekends, but seniors are your weekday mainstay, and there will be more of them.”
Doug Parker, golf manager for the city of Sacramento, is keeping his fingers crossed.
“The baby boomers are going to come into play soon,” Parker says. “That’s great news. On the other hand, people are working longer, retiring later.”
Industry advocates identify two groups that will help them “grow the game,” to use their phrase. Juniors and women are being courted like never
before.
“We’ve got to grow the game,” Parker says. “We’ve got to introduce young people to the game. They’re our future.”
Sacramento certainly measures up on the junior front. It’s not uncommon to see two or three boys on the same team shooting sub-par scores in a local high school match, and the quality of girls’ play has undergone a stunning transformation in recent years.
Angie Dixon, the director of competitive activities for the First Tee of Greater Sacramento, played on the boys team at El Camino High School in the late 1980s. As the girls coach at Loretto High School, she sees a completely different landscape.
“When I played junior golf here, it was just Jamille and me,” Dixon says, referring to Jamille Jose, the former U.S. Girls’ Junior champion who attended Rio Americano High School and Stanford University. “Looking back to 1995, St. Francis had the only girls team in the area. In 1999, golf became a recognized high school sport for girls, and today you have upwards of 300 to 350 girls playing high school golf.”
The First Tee of Greater Sacramento increased its participation by 10 percent in 2006. Approximately 400 boys and girls play the First Tee of Greater Sacramento Junior Tour. Dixon estimates that the participation rate of girls in the First Tee Sacramento program is 30 to 35 percent, well above the national average of 25 percent.
“I think the growth is due to the programs we’ve had for kids,” Dixon says. “It’s a social thing for girls. It’s a big difference from how it used to be — going out with your dad to play.”
The 238 First Tee programs across the country teach life skills alongside chipping and putting.
“We’re really more about youth development than we are about golf,” says Terry Privott, CEO of First Tee of Greater Sacramento. “We’re very proud of what we’ve done.”
Women are a tougher sell. Tyra Jarvis, an Auburn resident who served as president of the Executive Women’s Golf Association, says the industry is more focused on juniors.
“With juniors, the thinking is, even if they stop playing, they might come back,” Jarvis says. “It’s like riding a bike — catch them early and they’ll never forget how to do it. But when you look at the adult market, women have been underrepresented.”
The Executive Women’s Golf Association is a national organization dedicated to providing opportunities for women to learn how to play golf and incorporate it into their careers. The consensus is that more women are playing golf in the Sacramento region, but Jarvis says time remains a formidable obstacle.
“If you can hook a woman in golf, they’ll drive a lot of the family decisions toward golf,” Jarvis says. “But the real threat is time — it doesn’t work in a time-
constrained society. That’s why we’re kicking around ideas such as two- or three-hole rounds, or organized putting rounds.”
Surveys show that two factors limit golf’s appeal to a wider audience: time and cost. Even Jack Nicklaus is a proponent of six-hole courses as a way of drawing people in who refuse to commit five or six hours to an 18-hole round of golf.
Purists may blanch at such a notion, but newcomers might have an entirely different take on a 60-minute round.
“Our executive nine at Bing Maloney (Golf Course) is going gangbusters,” says Sacramento golf manager Parker. “The way society is right now, a lot of people just don’t have time to play four- and five-hour rounds.”
