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The post This reborn L.A. muni has $9.50 green fees and a priceless history appeared first on Golf.

There’s a hole at Maggie Hathaway Golf Course in Los Angeles patterned on an architectural template — the Lion’s Mouth, a classic feature defined by a meddlesome bunker fronting much of the green. You’ll find versions of it at select private clubs, and at marquee public courses where tee times require months of advance planning. Most days at Maggie Hathaway, you can walk up and get on.

It’ll cost you, though. Green fees max out at $9.50.

Maggie Hathaway is a nine-hole par-3 course that has been in operation since 1962, but not always under its current name and not always in its current form. It was originally known as the Jack Thompson Golf Course before being rechristened in 1997 in honor of the woman who helped make public golf in Los Angeles the melting pot it is today.

Hathaway was a blues singer, actress and civil rights activist who organized pickets of segregated courses and petitioned L.A. public officials to open county layouts to everyone. She wasn’t alone on the front lines of that fight, but she was a leader, and the course that bears her name is a monument to a worthy battle won.

Glen Porter never met Hathaway, who died in 2001. But he knows her namesake layout about as well as anyone. It was where he learned the game some 20 years ago, long before he came aboard as general manager. Some things haven’t changed since he first set foot on property. Now, as then, the course gives way to sweet views of the city, sweeping west across downtown and on to the Hollywood sign in the distance. Junior rates remain $1, the same fee Porter paid as a kid.

In that sense, the place feels as familiar as ever. In other ways, though, it’s dramatically transformed.

“Like night and day,” Porter says.

In late March, Maggie Hathaway reopened following a comprehensive renovation that delivered a new routing, new turf, new irrigation, new green complexes, and sandy waste areas, along with an expanded and relocated practice range and a large, unruly putting green.

Once soft and spongy, the terrain has been remade into a firm, fast playground, with the same tight-mown grass varietals golfers enjoy at Los Angeles Country Club, and a fresh injection of strategic intrigue.

“The greens used to be small, flat circles,” Porter says.

Today, they are rumpled, flanked by speedy runoffs and shot through with nods to classic design features, from a double-plateau green on the 4th hole that borrows from the work of C.B. Macdonald to a flip-wedge 9th hole whose green was inspired by the par-3 10th hole at Pine Valley.

In its prior iteration, Maggie Hathaway was light on bunkers. Sand now figures prominently, in waste areas that lend a rustic aesthetic and green-side bunkers that compound the consequences of errant shots. One such hazard is the Lion’s Mouth, lurking at the front of the 2nd green.

Like other recent headline-making muni renovations, including the Patch in Augusta and the Park in West Palm Beach, the Maggie Hathaway project was propelled by a public-private partnership. A fundraising effort, led by members of Los Angeles Country Club, brought in a total of $21 million. The county contributed another $8 million, and Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner — the architects who reworked both courses at LACC in advance of the 2023 U.S. Open — pitched in their design services for free.

One measure of the payoff can be seen on the tee sheet. The course now sees some 180 rounds a day, Porter says, roughly double the pre-renovation volume. And with a clubhouse and training center under construction, it will soon have even greater gravitational pull. Already, local public-school programs have a home at Maggie Hathaway, though the course is a magnet for old-timers, too. Many of the regulars came of age in the game here decades ago. Some drifted away but have found their way back. Porter is one of them. The $1 junior who grew up to run the place.

He never crossed paths with Maggie Hathaway. But he knows enough about her to know she would be pleased.

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The post Is golf more expensive than ever? It’s complicated appeared first on Golf.

The post Is golf more expensive than ever? It’s complicated appeared first on Golf.

How much did you pay for your last round of golf?

If you played Sharp Park, just south of San Francisco — the only seaside municipal course in the country designed by Alister MacKenzie — your green fees topped out at $86. That’s roughly one-fifth of what it costs to play Pasatiempo, the next nearest public-access MacKenzie layout, 50 miles down the coast.

The two courses share a designer but differ starkly in conditioning, atmosphere, clientele and ranking. The nearly $350 price gap reflects that. Yet for all that separates them, the properties represent just two points on a spectrum that extends far in either direction, from $5 junior rates at the local muni to north of $1,000 at the highest end. That vast range is one hallmark of a game that is booming as never before.

Between 2019 and 2025, golf participation in the United States swelled by 41 percent and is now closing in on 50 million participants, according to the National Golf Foundation (NGF), which counts participants as people who played either on a green-grass course or at an off-course facility such as a range or simulator venue. Annual rounds played have reached record numbers. But that headline figure obscures another statistic worth sitting with: market research shows that 7 to 8 percent of golfers account for approximately 80 percent of total spending in the game. The boom is real, but it is not evenly distributed, an imbalance that helps explain what has happened to prices.

Growth, of course, hardly counts as bad news. But it has come with grumbling, and not just from golfers who have to wake up earlier, or click more quickly, to nab a tee time at their favorite course. A common sentiment among consumers is that the costs of playing have gotten out of hand.

The data, at least at the national level, tells a more measured story. A recent NGF analysis of public-access rates found that from 2019 through 2025, average green fees rose by around 29 percent, an increase largely on pace with inflation and relatively modest by sports and entertainment standards. By comparison, the NGF reported, the cost of attending an NFL game has risen around 50 percent over the past six years. The price of a movie ticket has jumped some 60% over that same period.

Such aggregate pictures can be valuable. There’s plenty to learn from them. Still, there are limits to what they show.

“National numbers are great,” says Jon Last, founder and president of Sports and Leisure Research Group, a New York-based marketing research consultancy. “But they only get you so far if you don’t have a good sense as a facility operator of what your specific situation can bear.”

A more detailed portrait reveals what Last describes as a “hyper-local reality” — a picture that shifts dramatically from one zip code to the next, and one that mirrors a K-shaped economy running through American life. The rich are getting richer, and they’re spending accordingly. That’s most glaringly apparent in the proliferation of high-end private clubs with tiny memberships and exorbitant dues. But the public-access numbers hint at the phenomenon, too. Since 2019, the NGF reports, average resort green fees have climbed by 36 percent, with average peak-season rates at those properties now exceeding $100. The figure does not account for a slate of variables, including seasonal discounts and replay rates. But no matter how you slice it, it is significantly more than the just-over $41 average at municipal and daily-fee courses.

What’s true in other sectors ranging from air travel to automobiles applies to golf: the price gap grows more rapidly the higher up the spending scale you go.

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As the gulf between the game’s haves and have-nots expands, the middle of the market risks thinning out. The most imperiled courses in the current climate are privately owned, daily-fee properties near big cities, where land and labor are expensive. Those are the ones most likely to close, says Jay Karen, CEO of the National Golf Course Owners Association (NGCOA), and they aren’t likely to be replaced.

“Nobody I know is building a regulation, 18-hole daily fee golf course in a high-population area,” Karen says. “It doesn’t pencil out to do that anymore.”

Farther-flung courses are a different story. The remote golf craze owes in part to the quality of the designs and the beauty of the settings. But it has also been propelled by a less romantic factor: Those places are where golf makes business sense. Location, location, location. Call it a new spin on an old rule.

As for green fees, Karen says the rising numbers require context. During a 15-year stretch from 2005 to 2019, when golf participation largely held steady or declined, prices lagged behind the cost of living. In real terms, the game got cheaper. That courses now charge more doesn’t mean they’re rolling in profits or price-gouging. Many are simply playing catchup, either pouring money into deferred improvements or setting it aside for a rainy day, such as the day the irrigation system finally gives out.

“Golfers for the most part don’t understand how expensive it is to run a course,” Karen says. “The truth is, if you want your course to stick around, you’ve got to pay a reasonable price for it.”

In generations past, golf course development was driven largely by real estate: subdivisions with layouts stitched through them. Those days are gone, Karen says, and they aren’t coming back, “unless we want to start building housing with courses in the middle of nowhere, which I don’t see happening.”

What the supply might look like in future generations ranks high on Karen’s list of concerns. The accessible path forward, many in the industry agree, runs across public land. Karen and others see the municipal sector as the game’s most viable outlet for keeping traditional golf within reach of ordinary players. Not only is NGCOA bullish on munis, but private backers have gotten behind them too, in initiatives aimed explicitly at keeping high-quality golf affordable and accessible. Projects like the Patch in Augusta, the Park in West Palm Beach and Cobbs Creek in Philadelphia have attracted serious capital and ambition.

That’s a sunny side of the story. At the same time, Karen says, “we are also hearing pain points” brought on by the post-Covid boom: packed tee sheets, for instance, that squeeze out discounted junior programs, and players who can’t get a reservation at all. No one wants to see their neighborhood course become like the restaurant Yogi Berra once dismissed: so popular that nobody goes there anymore. Access remains a stubborn issue. Alt-golf venues — short courses, simulator bays, gamified ranges and such — have addressed it on the margins. The traditional game is working hard to keep up.

Further complicating consumer patterns is a shift that economics alone don’t capture. Since the pandemic, and against a backdrop of global instability, consumers across a range of income brackets increasingly have prioritized leisure time now, says Last of Sports and Leisure Research Group. Even golfers who never studied Latin appreciate the phrase carpe diem, and they’re acting on it, whether or not their salaries are equal to the spend. How long that will continue is impossible to know. But in the meantime, the industry keeps adding to its catalog of splurges.

The result is a different kind of bifurcation — not separate rules and equipment for pros and amateurs, but disparate experiences for golfers. 

Does a round count as bargain or an extravagance? It’s complicated. But as Karen sees it, such complications are an industry strength.

“Golfers have all kinds of motivations for where they play and why, and the price tag is simply one variable,” he says. “The complexities of the golf economy have allowed it to survive over time. If we were a monolith, and all of a sudden prices went off a cliff, we might see catastrophe. But somehow for 150 years, we have had an industry that has ebbed and flowed and morphed with the times and the people. And I think that will continue.”

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The post The Bandon Dunes of muni golf? A course operator sees that in San Francisco’s future appeared first on Golf.

The post The Bandon Dunes of muni golf? A course operator sees that in San Francisco’s future appeared first on Golf.

Which American city lays claim to the richest concentration of high-quality municipal golf?

On the strength of Bethpage State Park alone, New York is an immediate contender. Boston has its share. Chicago and Philadelphia can point to several standouts. Los Angeles makes a credible argument with the likes of Rancho Park and Griffith Park.

But when you factor in history, pedigree and sheer accessibility within a compact radius, another candidate rises to the top: San Francisco.

Don’t agree?

Tom Hsieh might like a word.

Hsieh is a San Francisco native and readily concedes a hometown bias. His parents were immigrants who fled Maoist China. Both developed a deep affection for the city. Hsieh’s father — also Tom — fell in love with golf and passed that passion on to his son.

The younger Hsieh learned the game at Gleneagles Golf Course, a nine-hole layout tucked into the hills on the south edge of San Francisco, overlooking the bay. Designed by Jack Fleming, a former protege of Alister Mackenzie who became San Francisco’s official golf caretaker, Gleneagles, which opened in 1962, is defined by quirky challenges and charm. Lee Trevino tried to conquer it twice, but couldn’t. The fairways are sloping. The greens are defiant and the wind is a near-constant off the nearby water. 

As for the clubhouse, it’s a time-capsule. Other infrastructure is ancient, too; the course still relies on its original irrigation system. In the early 2000s, when Gleneagles’ longtime operator retired, the city put the course out for bid. There were no takers. Hsieh had no experience running a golf facility. But he stepped in anyway, assuming the lease to keep Gleneagles alive.

What followed was a wild ride, one that included more than a few existential crises for the course. Like many courses, Gleneages has benefited from the Covid boom. But its endurance owes a great deal to Hsieh.

His background helps explain his success. A former political consultant who worked on campaigns for the likes of former San Francisco mayor (and now California governor) Gavin Newsom, Hsieh understands the workings of the city and everything that muni golf is up against, from tight budgets to lingering stereotypes about the game.

For all of its popularity these days, golf still suffers from public blindspots. Remove those blinkers, Hsieh says, and its clear that San Francisco, a 7-by-7-mile city, is sitting on invaluable recreational assets that go widely under-appreciated.

Travel

Why the survival of this Alister MacKenzie muni means so much to golf

By: Josh Sens

Under the parks and recreation department are six public layouts (technically, Sharp Park, the only seaside muni designed by Alister Mackenzie, sits just south of the city’s border, but it’s part of the fold). Over the past three decades, Hsieh notes, San Francisco voters have approved roughly a billion dollars in bond measures for parks. Not a dollar of that money, he says, has been earmarked for golf.

Hsieh hasn’t formally pitched the idea to city leaders, but he’d like to see San Francisco lean into what it already has and market itself as Golf City USA, a destination with premium public-access golf as a draw.

Tourists already flock to the city. Why not give them another reason? Think of it, Hsieh suggests, as a kind of Bandon Dunes for muni golf, except in the middle of one of the world’s great urban hubs.

That would require a robust investment to improve course conditions and amenities. But Hsieh sees proof of concept at Harding Park and the Golden Gate Park Par-3 course, both of which have gone through renovations that helped propel them to national attention. The lesson is plain, Hsieh believes. Put TLC into courses, and the golfers will come.

He makes the full case, while telling the story of Gleneagles and his life in the game, in a recent appearance on the Destination Golf podcast. You can listen to that episode here.

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The post Far from D.C. and Donald Trump, a jilted nonprofit has next muni project appeared first on Golf.

The post Far from D.C. and Donald Trump, a jilted nonprofit has next muni project appeared first on Golf.

You’d be hard-pressed to find many fans of public golf, regardless of political persuasion, who are pleased with recent developments out of Washington, D.C. The nation’s capital has instead been a source of disappointment for many, stemming from the Department of the Interior’s decision in late December to terminate the National Links Trust’s lease on three municipal courses — Rock Creek, East Potomac and Langston. The decision came just weeks after President Trump floated the idea of taking over the courses himself, raising concerns among public golf advocates about both affordability and the fate of the historic designs.

This week, though, there is better news for muni golf boosters, involving that same nonprofit but coming from the far side of the country. The National Links Trust has announced a new municipal project in Washington State. It’s built on a partnership with the Friends of the Port Townsend Golf Park to guide the future of Camas Prairie Park, an historic public golf property roughly 60 miles north of Seattle.

Formerly known as the Port Townsend Golf Club, Camas Prairie Park is anchored by a nine-hole course that dates to 1904 and today operates as a multi-use public space, with a driving range, disc golf, walking trails, a restaurant and a nature preserve. After two years of local stewardship, the Friends secured a 20-year lease extension in late 2025.

Under the new agreement, National Links Trust will help develop a master plan focused on affordability, environmental sustainability and community access. As part of the agreement, a Himalayas-style putting course will also be constructed, supported by a $250,000 grant from a family foundation.

Trust officials say the partnership had been in development for months before the D.C. lease was terminated, a point they’re keen to clarify given the timing of the announcement.

“It might appear as if we’re preparing for a post-D.C. future, but that’s not the case,” a Trust spokesperson said. “This isn’t instead of D.C. We are going on parallel paths.”

The spokesperson added that the Port Townsend partnership represents “the most concrete step we’ve taken toward trying to have a national footprint.”

The announcement comes amid deep uncertainty about the Trust’s future in Washington, D.C. The nonprofit was founded in 2017 to revitalize Rock Creek, East Potomac and Langston, with celebrated architect Tom Doak on board to help oversee the renovation plans. Since taking over operations in 2020, the Trust has invested more than $8.5 million in capital improvements. During that same period, rounds-played and revenue have increased, and green fees have remained among the lowest of any major municipal system in the country. Planned renovations, supported by pro bono work from Doak, Gil Hanse and Beau Welling, were already underway when the lease was revoked.

In a statement after its contract was terminated, the National Links Trust said it was “devastated” by the move and disputed the Trump administration’s claim that it had been in default under the lease.

What comes next in the capital remains unclear. President Trump has said that the course would offer lower rates for locals (though he did not specific a price range). According to reports, he wants to hire Tom Fazio to oversee a redesign. The president and the architect met in person in December, though no formal plans have been announced. The National Links Trust continues to operate the courses in the meantime, but a spokesperson said the uncertainty makes it difficult to manage staffing, budgets and long-term planning.

“We would still like to be involved in D.C. in the long term, but that’s hard when there are so many questions about the future,” the spokesperson said. The Camas Prairie Park project, he noted, “is kind of our way of saying, ‘We’re open for business.’ Our mission remains the same. We want to preserve high-quality affordable golf. That’s really the message. We want to help wherever we can.”

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The post This restored Florida muni was our most-read travel story of 2025 appeared first on Golf.

The post This restored Florida muni was our most-read travel story of 2025 appeared first on Golf.

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator says in a famed short story. “They are different from you and me.”

For starters, they have a lot more money. They also tend to play a lot more golf courses. Nowadays, that seems particularly true.

If you keep up with golf headlines, you’ve noticed the trend. Every turn of the news cycle seems to bring word of yet another exclusive enclave in the making, targeting a tiny membership with staggering invitation dues.

Clearly, there’s a market for such projects.

There’s also a place in golf publications for stories about them, offering a gauzy sneak peek at playgrounds that most golfers will never see in person. But there comes a point when the audience tires of hearing about the out-of-reach and starts to think: How about some coverage of a course where anyone can, you know, get a tee time?

Maybe that explains our best-read travel story of 2025.

The article traces the unlikely arc of Dunedin Golf Club, a Donald Ross design on Florida’s Gulf Coast, just north of Tampa, born in the boom years of the 1920s, humbled by the Depression and reborn as a municipal course long before “muni” became a bootstrapping badge of honor. Along the way, it served as the PGA of America’s headquarters, hosted 18 straight Senior PGA Championships and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, even as it drifted from its Golden Age roots.

You can probably see where this is headed. Earlier this year, a $6 million restoration of Dunedin was completed. Overseen by Ross expert Kris Spence, the work peeled back layers to reveal Ross’s original greens, routing and strategic intent, returning the course to its century-old self. With its revival, Dunedin joined a short list of top-flight, rejuvenated Florida munis that includes Winter Park in Orlando and The Park at West Palm Beach.

That’s more like it, our audience seemed to say. If the story resonated with them, the green fees probably did, too. They start at under $100.

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The post This muni’s weekly golf league represents what’s great about the game appeared first on Golf.

The post This muni’s weekly golf league represents what’s great about the game appeared first on Golf.

Last month, as the FedEx Cup Playoffs were winding down, another season-long golf competition drew to a close. But unlike Tommy Fleetwood, its winner did not receive an eight-figure paycheck. What he earned were high fives, hearty congratulations and the promise of a commemorative fashion accessory that has not yet been manufactured.

So it goes.

The pros play one game for a living. And the rest of us play another for rewards that can’t be measured in standard currency. We play for the fresh air and the exercise, for the camaraderie, community and quirky collectibles — and, of course, for the bragging rights. It’s hard to put a price on beating your buddies.

Jeff Pelizzaro understands this. It’s what the league he co-founded is all about. 

“There’s just so much more to golf that trying to post a score,” he says.

Pelizzaro, 47, is a relative latecomer to game. Born and raised in St. Louis, he focused on soccer growing up and didn’t swing a club in earnest until after college, when the game hooked him. A physical therapist by trade, he soon merged his passion with his profession through 18Strong, a golf fitness and training company that he runs with his business partner, Ryan McMullen. For about a decade, the two also co-hosted a podcast of the same name, which drew guests from across the industry to talk about the link between golf and fitness, and the other way around.

One of the podcast’s sponsors was Linksoul, the golf apparel brand whose founder, John Ashworth, champions a weekly tradition at Goat Hill Park in Southern California called Mandatory Golf Fridays — the gist being that life shouldn’t be all work, all the time, and that getting out at least once a week is good for your body and your mind. Pegging it is pretty much required.

Pelizzaro shares that view. Inspired by Ashworth’s weekly mandate, he mustered something similar, rallying friends to join him for nine holes on Friday mornings at Ruth Park, a St. Louis muni. These breezy daybreak loops became a welcome weekly breather in a schedule crammed with work and family obligations.

In the early goings, Pelizzaro and his buddy, Brian Daniels, borrowed Ashworth’s verbiage. They called the outings Mandatory Golf Fridays. But when they learned that Linksoul had a copyright on the name, they changed theirs to The Friday Loop.

By any label, the concept appealed. It gained in popularity in the wake of Covid. Last year, as many as 50 golfers turned up at one time or another for The Friday Loop, ranging in age and ability from plus-index teenage collegiate players to 50-somethings who struggle to make bogey.

As attendance swelled, gatherings grew more formalized, with tee times blocked out at Ruth Park from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. every week. For the 2025 season, Daniels also cooked up a FedEx Cup points system and a friendly, 12-week handicapped competition called The Chase for the Buckle — as in a belt buckle, the commemorative prize that the winner would receive.

(Why a belt buckle? Long story short, the idea was born during a golf trip Pelizzaro and Daniels took to Nashville, where belt buckles are as common as country music stars.)

Two weeks ago, after a full summer of competition, The Chase for the Buckle concluded, and The Friday Loop anointed its Tommy Fleetwood. His name is John Mossotti, though his playing partners call him “Mossy.” (According to Pelizzaro, all the regulars in the The Friday Loop have nicknames, which, like the monikers dolled out by Tiger Woods, seem to involve little more than adding a “y” to a player’s actual name.)

Mossy entered the season with a 9 index, but more than once this summer, he shot 9-hole rounds of even par that raised some eyebrows among his competition. It wouldn’t be a handicapped event if there weren’t whispered sandbagging allegations.

“I told him, every champion is going to take arrows in the back,” Pelizzaro says. “That’s just the way it goes.”

All of this, of course, is meant in fun, in the grief-giving spirit of golfers everywhere.

Mandatory Golf Fridays. The Friday Loop. Outings of their kind aren’t hard to come by. They crop up from coast to coast, in nearly every corner of the country where the game is played. The prizes vary. The participants do, too. But the ties that bind them are the same. They’re the reason most people play the game.

As for the buckle, Mossy hasn’t received it yet because the buckle still does not exist. It is being manufcatured by a company that Pelizzaro and Daniels found online. Mossy will have to wait. But no matter. As every golfer knows, winning something like the buckle is far more important than actually wearing it. Sandbagger or not, Mossy has bragging rights.

Now, with fall approaching and The Chase for the Buckle in the rearview mirror, The Friday Loop is done for the season. But, Pelizzaro says, he and his friends will continue sneaking out whenever they can until cold weather settles over St. Louis and their course shuts down for the year.

In the pro ranks, meanwhile, Fleetwood and 23 of his peers will soon be going at it at the Ryder Cup, a biennial competition for which members of Team USA will be getting paid. That’s nice work if you can get it. But there are many other ways to enjoy the game.

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The post This Donald Ross muni just came back to life with $6 million restoration appeared first on Golf.

The post This Donald Ross muni just came back to life with $6 million restoration appeared first on Golf.

Nearly a century ago, when the ‘20s were still roaring and no one thought a crash was just around the corner, Donald Ross completed work on a course then known as Dunedin Isles Golf Club, an 18-hole design on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Situated in the city of Dunedin (pronounced dun-EE-din), just north of Tampa, the layout, which opened in 1927, sat on land that Ross regarded as ideal for the game: gently rolling and graced with natural hazards. Waterways running through it rose and fell with the tide. Ross sought to do the backdrop justice. His routing featured fairways that bent and buckled in strategic fashion. The greens, in keeping with their author’s reputation, made beguiling targets, with subtle humps and hollows and testy runoffs spilling here and there. In the style and variety of the challenge, which encouraged shot-shaping and bump-and-runs, Ross had brought a slice of his native Scotland to the Sunshine State.

He was gratified enough with the results to call the course a “masterpiece,” high praise from a man who had amassed a pretty good portfolio.

Then the economy caved in. The Depression did to Dunedin Isle GC what it did to countless projects. The club changed ownership more than once, until 1939, when the city of Dunedin acquired it. Just like that, Ross’s masterpiece became a muni.

And its story was just kicking into gear.

In 1944, with the war winding down and golf regaining steam, the PGA of America relocated its headquarters from Chicago to Florida, and chose Dunedin as its home base. The organization stuck around until 1962. During its stay, Dunedin Isles GC was renamed PGA National Golf Club. Under the banner, it would go on to host 18 consecutive Senior PGA Championships as well as the inaugural PGA Merchandise Show. If you’re keeping score at home, it’s worth noting that a gathering now held in a cavernous convention center started in a golf course parking lot.

As for the course itself, nothing ever stays the same.

As years passed, Dunedin’s great muni bore less and less resemblance to what Ross had created. The usual suspects — time, deferred maintenance, old-fashioned wear and tear — were partly to blame. But so were a handful of renovations that pulled the property away from its Golden Age roots.

By then, the course had been rebranded Dunedin Golf Club — a simple name that underscored its connection to the city — and many locals recognized its worth. In 2014, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A decade after that, a $6 million restoration got underway.

The project started a year ago in March and wrapped up in December. Within nine months, features dulled for generations sprang back to life.

It helped that the bones of the layout were intact. Buried under layers of organic buildup, the greens, in all their lovely shape and contour, remained pretty much as Ross had built them. Kris Spence, the Ross expert who oversaw the restoration, likened the project to an excavation: archaeology applied to the ancient game. 

The putting surfaces Spence uncovered have the same contours and elevation shifts that they presented golfers in the 1920s. They are, Spence says, “as good as any out there with great variety.” The routing, meanwhile remains unchanged, though some bunkers have been moved to account for modern-day equipment; a Ross-ian test, updated for the post-titanium age. 

In its return to glory, Dunedin has joined a short list of the finest municipal courses in Florida, alongside Winter Park in Orlando and The Park at West Palm Beach. Call it throwback golf, at time-capsule prices. Rates for 18 holes range from $85 to $130.

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The post Golf courses have a tee time problem. This startup is helping to solve it appeared first on Golf.

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At the height of the pandemic, Jake Gordon was like a lot of golfers in the Los Angeles area. A relative newcomer to the game, he could hardly get enough of it. He could also hardly get a tee time.

“I was the designated reservationist in our group,” Gordon says. “So, if you caught me on a Friday, I was that guy constantly refreshing the page for every course in the area, looking for an opening. The pain and suffering was real.”

This was not a new story in L.A., the busiest year-round metropolitan golf market in the country. But it had grown more common since the Covid boom. And crowded tee sheets were not the only issue. The rise of bots and brokers had compounded the problem. Unwanted intermediaries snatched up many bookings almost as soon as they appeared (and often cancelled them last-minute, leaving gaps in the tee sheet that were nearly impossible to fill). 

None of this was good for golfers. It wasn’t great for course operators, either.

Clicking and refreshing in his search for tee times, Gordon, a hard-driving twentysomething with a background in technology startups, came to the classic entrepreneur’s conclusion: There had to be a better way. In collaboration with his friend, Dathan Wong, a software engineer and fellow golf fanatic, he put his mind to creating one.

As Gordon saw it, despite booming demand for tee times, capacity wasn’t really the problem; after all, if he waited long enough and searched hard enough, a spot on a tee sheet would usually open up somewhere around the city. The problem was the hassle and the inefficiency, which led courses to lose revenue and golfers to lose their minds.

“The process was way too manual,” Gordon says. “It was also impossible to know real-time inventory at all the different courses. And then on the other side, you had these courses that were getting hundreds of calls that they couldn’t answer and no way to get those golfers on a waiting list to fill those last-minute cancellations.”

Travel

Looking for a golf course to play? Try this genius search-and-booking tool

By: Alan Bastable

The solution, he determined, was to make access more equitable by building a digital tee time assistant that could match real-time supply and demand. The instant a slot opened, the system would send golfers an automatic alert. And if nothing was available at their target course, the system would clue them in to openings at other nearby properties.

For inspiration, Gordon and Wong looked to Open Table and Resy, which have alert functions to inform diners of availability, and online travel services like Google Flights and Expedia, which sync up customers with air carrier inventory. By spring of 2022, they were ready to launch. They called their product Noteefy. 

Unlike some well-known digital platforms in the golf space, Noteefy (pronounced “notify”) was not developed as a third-party booking service. In fact, Gordon and Wong weren’t going directly after golfers. Their customer was the course operator, who would pay a software licensing fee and share the benefits at no cost to the golfer via a free-to-download app.

“We weren’t looking to tackle this from the consumer side,” Gordon says. “That’s where you get things like bots and brokers who are out to monetize the process against the will of the course. We needed to get buy-in from the suppliers.”

The first supplier to bite, in 2022, was Brian Reed, then the general manager of Simi Hills Golf Course, a busy public facility just outside L.A. As at many area courses, the reservation line at Simi Hills was flooded daily. Keeping up with the calls was tough. Maintaining a list of names and call-back numbers was out of the question.

“So, when Jake called me up out of the blue and said, ‘What if I could build you an automated waiting list?’ I didn’t really have to think about my answer for too long,” Reed says.

Nor did it take long to see a difference. Soon after signing on with Noteefy, Reed noticed fewer empty slots on his tee sheet. Last-minute cancellations were getting filled. At the same time, call volume dropped, as golfers now had a more seamless option than trying to ring the pro shop. The upshot was less hair-pulling for the customer, and more income for the course. By the end of the year, Reed says, Noteefy bookings had accounted for upward of $40,000 in revenue that might otherwise have slipped away.

“We went from capturing almost none of those cancellations to getting at least a few a day,” Reed says. “That might not sound like much. But when your average green fee is $50 to $70, and every day you’re getting more of them, it adds up.”

As word got around, other operators bought in, too. Next up was the golf course management company KemperSports, which installed Noteefy at three of its properties, two in L.A. and one in North Carolina, before adding the software to its national portfolio. The pace of growth accelerated. Over the next 18 months, Noteefy expanded to more than 500 courses around the country, running the gamut from 9-hole rural tracks to high-end destinations such as Destination Kohler and Cabot Citrus Farms to TPC Scottsdale and Sand Valley.

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By which point, Gordon and Wong had quit their day jobs.

In Los Angeles, meanwhile, not much had changed. Landing a tee time was still a lot of work, particularly at jam-packed municipal courses. Local golfers grew fed up. This past spring, simmering frustrations reached a boil, which spilled into national stories about bots and brokers and what many saw as the muni system’s failure to deal with them. In March, five golfers went so far as to file a class action suit against the city alleging that “nothing had been done to ensure the book process is fair to all golfers who wish to play.”

The wheels of government can grind slowly, but all that grousing sped things up. In August, under growing public scrutiny, Los Angeles city and county courses began requiring a $10 per player non-refundable deposit on all golf reservations. An additional $10 per-player fee was also imposed on no-shows, and cancellations made within 48 hours. Those new policies put a damper on bots and brokers, but local operators weren’t done.

Last month, American Golf, which operates more than 20 courses in Southern California, including 13 L.A. county munis, adopted Noteefy. 

As Gordon is keen to point out, the system was never meant to be a bot-squasher. But he says that is a trickle-down effect. “The technology makes inventory accessible to everyone in real time at no cost to golfers,” Gordon says. “In doing that, it makes bots useless because there is no access or information advantage for bad actors.”

Bots or not, Gordon says he expects L.A. county courses to see millions of dollars in incremental revenue, a roughly 30 percent reduction in phone calls and “thousands of happier golfers.”

What kind of impact it is having in the county is too early to say. Rick Crowder, head of revenue management at American Golf for L.A. county courses, says he’ll have a clearer picture in another few months but that he’s optimistic.

“I believe in the technology,” Crowder says.

The licensing fee for Noteefy varies from one operator to the next depending on the number of courses they run and the volume of play. But Gordon says the cost averages out to “the equivalent of one to two tee times per month, and we deliver a few tee times a day.”

And he sees applications in other industries. By Gordon’s calculations, golf courses have been leaving more than $100,000 a year on the table from last-minute cancellations going unfilled. The losses, he says, are just as great or greater elsewhere. Hence his plan to expand Noteefy to other services, such as hotels and spas to help resolves what he believes is a “$1 billion problem” in the high-end hospitality sector. 

Muni golf in L.A. might not count as high-end, but it’s hard to put a price on a tee time with your buddies.

“It’s still a grind to get one,” Gordon says. “But our luck is much better now.”

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The post What saved this cute golf oasis? Money from a surprising source appeared first on Golf.

GREENFIELD, Wis. — Like any industry of goods, golf courses exist on a spectrum. That’s easy to see. But the best visual of the roster of courses across America is a bell curve. Fat in the middle — defined by your typical, $100 round on a tree-lined course — and thin on either side, from Pebble Beach to pitch-n-putts.

Diametrically opposed as the thin ends of the curve may be, you rarely get to the ritzy, exclusive, architecturally brilliant far right without starting somewhere near its cheap, basic, municipal opposite — places like Zablocki Park, just southwest of Milwaukee.

Zablocki warms the heart, like most pitch-n-putts do. It’s filled with cutoff tank tops and cargo shorts. You see more Crocs than golf shoes. In the heat of summer, some players turn in the collared shirt for no shirt at all. (And no one cares to stop them!)

The 1st tee is about eight paces from the parking lot. The 3rd green is about eight paces from the center-field fence of a nearby baseball field. The nine holes range from 77 to 110 yards long. You can watch soccer matches while you wait on the 5th tee, like I did two Mondays ago. The sunset had turned pink for the six of us on property, ripping around by ourselves at a 45-minute pace. Does entry-level golf get any better? 

Zablocki defines the phrase no frills. Each time I’ve played it, there wasn’t even an employee kicking around in the blue, brick shack near the 1st tee. Therein lies some of its brilliance: They don’t really need someone running it. With an honor box — and the modern equivalent: a scan-to-pay QR code — guests need not be ushered out via some doting Milwaukee County Parks staffer. You show up, you pay and then you’re off. 

The price you’ll find is an offensively modest $8. Cheaper than your Subway BLT. You’re forced to wonder — how could a golf course operate on $8 greens fees? Well, the fees of its greens have become next-to-nothing. 

Thanks to COVID-era federal funding, via the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, Milwaukee County earned $22 million for one-time investments designed to improve cost-saving in the future. Part of that money was earmarked for Zablocki, due to its popularity and usage rate. It was unsurprisingly costly to maintain natural grass greens for a tiny pitch-n-putt, so the Parks Department replaced those greens and tees with synthetic turf, effectively eliminating daily maintenance costs. In an era defined by government cutbacks on municipal golf, this feels like purposeful sustenance.

A similar pitch-n-putt on the north side of Milwaukee — Noyes Park — used $1 million of the same funding on a new irrigation system, improving the course without forcing the Parks Department to increase greens fees. Fittingly, Noyes also charges just $8 per round. The funding has given Noyes a three-decade lease on life, Parks Director Jim Tarantino told Milwaukee Magazine.

For Zablocki, it may be a permanent lease. Mostly because the synthetic greens are really quite good. They’re not cheap. They’re resistant to damage. They drain better than the bathroom tub. Each green has four holes cut into them, which are rotated for use by Parks staff and otherwise filled by turf covers when not in use. They’ve got some serious firmness, but are receptive to spin. What used to be a downtrodden set of landing zones, peppered with ball marks are now a very trustworthy, challenging endeavor. Making a 3 is easier than it used to be, but making a 2 is damn difficult. Make a 1 and your name goes up on the white, paper leaderboards taped to the window at the starter shack. 

“Only rule we ask is that you only play one ball, no mulligan, honor play,” the leaderboard reads. “CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR SHOT!”

Congrats indeed. When I played it, the most recent ace on the board was made by 14-year-old Christopher, who, according to the Best Score leaderboard nearby, has been getting his fill on Zablocki. Christopher aced the 1st hole, as did 8-year-old Dominic at the end of August. On the other end, 73-year-old DJ Haugh aced the 8th hole three weeks ago.

How about that for a spectrum? 

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