CLUB MANAGERS
The Rules
BRIAN MALONEY, Springfield Golf and Country Club of Attraction
The game has changed for club managers, who understand that golf is no longer the only driving force for membership | by ARTHUR UTLEY
BILL SHONK, Princess Anne Country Club
LEA MEIER, Richmond Country Club
BRIAN VINCEL, Spring Creek Golf Club
When Brian Maloney began his career as a club manager, he says that if the golf course was good, the beer was cold and one could get a decent hamburger, all was good. Oh, how the times have changed.“ Today, our members come for fitness classes, wine dinners, picnics on the lawn and a wide range of clinics for juniors, women and new golfers,” Maloney says.
Maloney, a member of the Virginia State Golf Association Board of Directors, has been the general manager at Springfield Golf and Country Club for 19 years. He is one of four club managers asked by Virginia Golfer to talk about some of the challenges he, and his counterparts all over the golf world, face on a daily basis.
As Lea Meier, general manager at Richmond Country Club and one of the few women in a male-dominated field says,“ It is a challenging time for clubs. They are not as popular as they used to be except for the very high-end facilities.”
Among the questions the four club managers were asked was to list the top three challenges they face.
“ The challenge in the club environment is maintaining a high level of service and offering an increasingly diverse variety of programs that appeal to more than just the golfer in the family,” Maloney says.“ Staffing and training to provide that high level of service is also a daily challenge. Over time, we have become more creative in ways to draw people to the club.”
Excellent service is a must for clubs recruiting millennials— individuals born between 1977 and 1995— to become members. According to an October 2016 national study by the Club Managers Association of America, The Club Foundation and The Center for Generational Kinetics and provided to Virginia Golfer by Princess Anne Country Club general manager Bill Shonk, 33 percent of millennials say a lack of excellent service would be a deal breaker and absolutely prevent them from becoming a club member.
Shonk says one of his chief challenges is consistently maintaining service-level excellence in all areas of the club while melding part-time / seasonal staff with longtime staff. As with most clubs, the most intense activity at Princess Anne, located in Virginia Beach, occurs between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Many of the part-time / seasonal staff are millennials.
16 V IRGINIA G OLFER | M ARCH / A PRIL 2017 vsga. org