Bad weather, down economy make this an awful season for golf courses

Free hot dogs and a drink at the halfway house!

Your fourth golfer plays free!

We'll pick you up and drive you to the course!

OK, that last one may be a little too extreme, but not by much. Just check the newspaper or the Web.

Some suburban golf courses these days will do just about anything to get golfers on their grounds because these are tough times for local golf courses.

The toughest many can remember.

"Oh yes," said Dennis Johnson, PGA club manager and director of golf at Pine Meadow Golf Club in Mundelein. "And I've been a head pro for 35 years now."

No different for Preston "Pepi" Irwin, director of golf at Schaumburg Golf Club, who hasn't seen anything like it in his 21 years there.

"I've heard guys (at other courses) say they don't have anything else they can do," Irwin said. "Now they're getting to the point where they're going to start laying off staff. You see guys reporting anywhere from 20 to 25 percent down (in golf rounds) and of course the price of doing business on their end is going up.

"There is no bottom line. They're struggling just to keep it afloat."

The perfect storm

Though the sluggish economy has no doubt been a huge factor in limiting play, another major reason for the downturn has been good ol' Mother Nature.

Mesh those two forces together and it has been a perfect storm for the industry over the past few years.

"I was talking with a friend and said October 31, 2007, was a reasonable day weather-wise," Johnson said. "But it's been basically a bad weather pattern since then."

Including this year.

"We've lost so many weekend days," Irwin said. "For this season April was so poor, May was pretty poor and June wasn't much better. Coming out of the blocks with this weather has hurt us more than anything."

And those blasted long-term weather forecasts aren't helping any either.

"The forecasting is just killing us," Irwin said.

"The public does not understand that a 30 percent chance of rain is really a 70 percent chance of it being sunny," Johnson said. "I cannot tell you the number of times the weather forecast is bad and we sit with an empty golf course on a sunny day."

"The forecasting, in a lot of ways, can hurt you more than the actual weather," Irwin said.

Courses like Schaumburg are trying to do something about it. Their rain-check policy states basically if it rains during your round, you'll get a full rain-check regardless of where you were on the course when the rains came.

"We're trying to take the weather out of the equation," Irwin said.

Pro shops hurting

When those few sunny days do occur, local courses become a hive of activity.

"On our nice days our tee sheets are filling up and people are playing golf," Irwin said.

Now if they'd just stroll over to the pro shop and buy a driver or drop into the club's restaurant for some lunch, courses would not be feeling the pinch as much.

"The guy that plays three times a week and maybe buys a putter or a driver during the season, what I'm seeing is that he's not buying that new golf club, he's taking the money and using it for participating and playing," Irwin said. "So golf shop sales are down.

"The golf outing business is down, our programs - like junior golf - are down a little, too. They are taking from other areas to provide themselves the opportunity to play."

That means scouring the net for the lowest prices, and there are a lot of low prices out there as courses scramble to fill up their tee sheets.

"I've been here 21 years and for the first time last year we dabbled in some specials on the Internet," Irwin said. "What we found is it helped fill a few gaps that we had, but ultimately it didn't really do anything for us.

"There's no drawback business from that. Once the special was gone, the customer was gone."

The Tiger tease

Johnson heard it. Irwin heard it.

Their fellow course managers and professionals heard it too on the eve of the millennium: There's a golf boon on the horizon thanks in large part to the emergence of one Tiger Woods.

"The National Golf Foundation came out at one point and said you can open up a new golf course every day for the next so many years and we (still) won't have enough golf courses - well that wasn't true," Irwin said. "Everyone jumped on the bandwagon and everyone was building golf courses and it just got overbuilt."

"I think I can speak for almost all golf professionals: when there was all of the hype about how fast the game was growing and the need for these courses, we were looking at ourselves and saying 'where did all this come from?'" Johnson said. "Because we didn't see it."

But it did lead to more courses popping up and the fees to play golf popping way up as well.

"If you go back to 1998, that was the banner year for golf in Chicago - for rounds played," Johnson said. "If you look at price increases since that year, it was incredible how much prices were increased following that year. I think people thought they could get away with anything."

"Some of the policies golf courses put in drove people away, i.e. you have to ride (in a cart) even if you don't want to. To me, that's like going to a restaurant and them telling you, 'Well you have to order an appetizer even if you don't want to.' How long will that restaurant stay in business?"

Customer retention

Irwin, who has seen play at Schaumburg Golf Club drop from its high of 68-72,000 rounds a season in the mid- to late 1990s to around 50-55,000 in the last three years believes the clubs that survive in the future will do so because of the quality of the course itself and, just as important, the quality of its customer service.

"Whatever dollar amount the golf customer is comfortable with to play your facility, he's viewing your golf course as a value at that price," he said. "For that he wants good and consistent conditions and he wants good customer service. Those are the things that are going to bring people back."

And Irwin contends the people will indeed come back.

"I'm optimistic, I think we'll see a rebound," he said. "I don't think it will be as fast as people think. I think it will be a long, slow, gradual growth.

"It'll be tough, but it will come back at some point."

<table summary="SUMARRYHERE" class="sofT" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr> <td colspan="3" class="factboxheadblack">Golf's decline</td> </tr> <p class="News">Rounds of golf played in the United States</p> <tr> <td class="leadin">2000</td> <td class="leadin">2005</td> <td class="leadin">2008</td> </tr> <tr> <td class="leadin">518.4 million</td> <td class="leadin">499.6 million</td> <td class="leadin">489.1 million</td> </tr> </table> <p class="News">Source: National Golf Foundation </p>