Page 14 - GBC English Winter 2022

14
Golf Business Canada
Take a Good Hard Look
At the USGA, we do not own
or operate a single golf course. However, we do conduct fifteen national championships and each one of those has many, many qualifying sites. Over
the years, we have had our
fair share of poor and even notorious pace of play disasters and yes, there was a time when we pointed the finger at our competitors.
I am pleased to say though that we took a good hard look at ourselves and realized we could do much better. We have stretched out our tee intervals, extended the time between morning and afternoon waves, made our pace expectations for early groups more aggressive, and have done a better job enforcing our policy.Taken together, we have had many years now of our good pace, with significantly reduced waiting for our competitors.
Through our championship experience and in working with many golf courses, we have proven that the math works and is inescapable. We have also proven that if you want better pace and therefore a better (and hopefully more valuable) experience for your golfers the first group to point the finger
of blame at for poor pace is not the golfer, it is at ourselves.
Most golfers are familiar with the concept of a shot clock. We see it in basketball, curling, and football. Major League Baseball is adopting one next season. Our shot clock in golf starts the moment that the group in front of us clears the green. Yes, things can happen on the course. There is always that hole where it seems like all four of our group is digging around in the woods for our ball or we are all hitting out of the same greenside bunker. What’s important though, is that if a group is chronically out of position, as operators, we need to take steps to get them back into position. That might include suggesting they move up a tee or the marshal forecaddies for them for a couple of holes. They might need to skip a hole or (and hopefully it never has to come to this) we have to ask them to leave the course and come back at a less busy time, courtesy of the house. Yes, that group may be upset with any intervention, but we need to do right by all the groups behind them.
I hope that I have convinced you that the basic mathematics of pace of play is as inevitable and unavoidable as gravity, death, and taxes. I also hope that I have convinced you that the math leads to three pace of play fundamentals that are firmly in our control. If you can get these three simple basics right, your golfers and your business will be setup for success. Let us now explore how this can work in practice.
HOW TO ACCCURATELY DETERMINE PACE OF PLAY
How long should an early group, with little to no traffic in front of them take to play your course? How long after the group in front, should most groups take to finish? The answer to that is an unsatisfying yet accurate “it depends”. It depends on how challenging your course is, what the routing is like, how skilled your typical golfers are, etc. The good news is that it is very simple to measure.
A very easy method to implement is to have your starter and marshals keep an accurate record of the starting and finishing time of every groups. If you have a skeleton crew with their hands already full, consider hiring a high school student or a caddie to