many golf communities.
“We sold almost 60 homesites in 2013, and
20 of those folks joined the club, which is a
pretty good conversion percentage,” he asserts.
SOLIDIFYING BUSINESS DYNAMICS,
ALTERED AGRONOMICAL PRACTICES
JOHN MUMMERT/USGA PHOTO ARCHIVES
PORTLAND PRESS HERALD
Kingsmill, as mentioned, uses Williamsburg’s
relatively snow-free winter to sell resort
accommodations and golf after Groundhog
Day. Traditional Golf Properties uses a
similar approach with its cluster of upscale
Williamsburg courses, bundling them into
golf packages bought by road-tripping buddy
groups from the northeast. Mike Bennett,
vice president of the company, has been
working with his team for years to build and
solidify this business model. Its capacity to
offset weather fluctuations is unusual and
highly valuable. Bennett, a PGA professional,
considers Williamsburg “a micro-Myrtle
Beach, in the sense that people from New
Jersey, New York and New England want to
visit there and play golf. They simply want an
experience that is calmer and more low-key.
More cabernet than Corona, you might say.”
Some 3,500 additional rounds are sold
at each of the six courses this way “at rates
Myrtle Beach would love to get,” Bennett says.
This year the caravanning eight-somes
and 12-somes that Traditional Golf caters to
had to deal with more bracing conditions in
March and early April than they are used to.
“They have paid their fees in advance,
and they know to pack for cool conditions,
so we don’t lose that business the way
you lose business from local golfers who
figure they will just a wait a while longer,”
Bennett explains.
Discussing course conditions in the splitpersonality region of Virginia eventually
raises the bent-versus-bermuda debate.
It comes with the territory for Mark Cote,
the director of golf course maintenance at
The Pete Dye River Course of Virginia T
ech.
The rugged months brought zero-degree
temperatures in areas such as Radford, a part
of the world “not ideally suited for either type
of grass,” says Cote philosophically.
Committing itself to year-round play, The
Pete Dye River Course of Virginia T can’t
ech
cover its greens with plastic sheets, as courses
at higher elevations might.
“We were frozen quite a bit, but not snowcovered,” Cote reports.
He cuts two cup holes in each green and
switches the flagsticks back and forth for
setup variety, alternating between the pair of
hole locations.
“You can’t recut the cups until you get a
good thaw,” he says. “At one point we had
60-degree weather three days in a row and
the cups still wouldn’t budge.”
TIME AN IMPORTANT VARIABLE
Industry leaders who look at U.S. golf
through the widest possible lens haven’t
failed to notice the weather story of 2014’s
first quarter, even as it leaked into April.
Asked to comment on the effects of su