Page 11 - GBC English Winter 2022

The Myth of Pace of Play
The 3 truths to speed up play at your facility
Outside of the conditioning of the course, pace of play is one of the most important influences on your customers’ experience. Pace of play directly influences the value your customers place on their round, how likely they are to return, and how likely they are to recommend your course to their friends. With play and demand up, providing good pace with little waiting is more challenging than ever. Fortunately, there is no better time than the present to invest in getting pace of play right. Our research and experience with tackling pace at the USGA have proven what the math tells us; that the responsibility for tackling pace falls on us, the golf course operators.
Think back to the last time you were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Did you sit in your car cursing the person in front of you for not driving faster? Of course not, there is nowhere for them to go either. Yet, time after time, either as a golfer on the course or as an operator reviewing pace reports from our cart GPS system, we keep pointing the finger of blame at the group in front of us. As an industry, we perpetuate the blame, and myth, that it is their fault. I understand the temptation, as the USGA used to do exactly that with the competitors in our fifteen national championships.
As part of a pace measurement study, we conducted interviews with golfers coming off the eighteenth green at an incredibly busy municipal course with over 90,000 rounds a year. The vast majority of golfers blamed the group in front of them for being too slow as round times gradually, but inevitably, deteriorated from over four hours, to over five hours, to (gulp) over six hours. Little did those golfers know that what was really working against them was a policy as certain to be doomed to failure as it is certain that the sun will set tonight. I hope to lay out some of those basic “physics” and ask us, as an industry, to take accountability for adopting a strategy for pace of play that is rooted in fact and sets up our golfers for success.
LET’S LOOK AT THE MATH
I want you to imagine that you and your friends are playing the home hole. You are standing in the fairway (or if you are like me, more likely in the rough) waiting for the group in front to finish up. They putt out, shake a few hands and head off the green. Now, I want you to imagine that as soon as they clear the green, you start
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