Page 12 - GBC English Winter 2022

12
Golf Business Canada
It’s How Many Finish, Not Start
By far the most common pushback
we receive when recommending longer tee intervals is that it is reducing inventory. Done right, we do
not think that is true. Inventory of non- discounted rounds should be based on how many tee times are guaranteed to finish, not how many we start.The number of groups that can finish their round is determined by the course, the available daylight and the golfers playing from tees that match their abilities, not by how quickly we dump them onto the course with an inappropriately short tee time interval.
a stopwatch. I will return to this scenario a few times in this article, so try to envision a course that you are familiar with (hopefully your own!). Let’s pretend that from the time the group in front clears and to the time you hit your shots to the green, chip, putt, shake hands and walk off, it takes eleven minutes. That would be typical for a medium length par four.
OK, time for a little math. Let us now imagine that the group in front of us teed off at eight in the morning, finished at noon and therefore took exactly four hours to play their eighteen. In our scenario, your group finished eleven minutes after the group in front so therefore, you walk off the final green at eleven past noon. So, how long did your group take to play? The answer of course depends on when you teed off.
If the tee interval at this course is eleven minutes, then you teed off at 8:11am and your round also took exactly four hours. But, what if the tee interval was eight minutes instead? Then your round took four hours and three minutes (12:11 finish, 8:08 start equals 4:03 round time). That’s it. That is the math we need to understand how our pace policy affects round time. Whether our tee interval is eleven minutes or eight, your group can only finish as close behind the group in front as their skill and the difficulty of
the hole allows. As golf course operators, we determine through our tee time interval how long their round will take.
Now, an extra three minutes does not seem that bad, maybe not even noticeable. However, the insidious part of the math is that it becomes additive. If group after group finishes in an economical eleven minutes behind the group in front of them but we’ve set up an eight-minute interval on the tee sheet, each group’s round time will be three minutes longer than the one in front. So, ten groups in and we are now thirty minutes longer. That thirty minutes manifests itself as...you guessed it...waiting on the course. Waiting on the tee of that long par 3, waiting in the fairway of that reachable par 5.
The math for pace of play is as incontrovertible and as inescapable, as it is simple. If the tee interval is significantly shorter than our golfer’s ability to keep pace with the group in front of them, we are forcing them into a traffic jam and forcing them to wait. Conversely, if our tee interval is too long, we are not going to maximize rounds played on our course, leaving revenue on the table.
TRUTH #1: YOU NEED ACCURATE TEE-TIME INTERVALS When I talk to people about pace of play, I talk about a three-legged