If you haven’t had a chance to read the ASGCA’s new treatise on communicating the value that golf and golf courses deliver to the community at large, I strongly suggest you do so. Click HERE to download a copy.
The document, entitled "The Value of Golf Courses: Talking Points," is very well done. The idea behind it is right on the money: Architects need to do a better, more visible, more voluble job communicating the game’s benefits to people outside of golf. I love the American Society of Golf Course Architects; I served as president of the organization in 1998, so I’m totally on board with the effort.
But I want to do the ASGCA one better by enlisting everyone in golf — superintendents, club managers, board members and industry vendors — to take this message public, as well.
Architects have contact with the world outside of golf, of course. But you guys, especially you superintendents, are more numerous and arguably even better spokespeople — because you are permanent members of the communities in which you live and work, and you have specific knowledge of the ways your golf courses positively affect the local environment, the local work force and the recreational offerings in your specific part of the country.
It’s my opinion that we all have great stories to tell. The trick is thinking about them in the proper context — then telling them! Accordingly, this column will highlight three Talking Points, then expand on them using specific examples from our context, our various design and construction projects. The hope is this will help you do the same — generate your own talking points that speak specifically to local benefits stemming from your own course facility.
• The storm water retention benefits afforded by a golf course dramatically illustrate the environmental value to surrounding areas, reads the new ASGCA document. Heavy rains in the U.S. during the summer of 2010 led to record flooding in some areas. However, where a golf course was designed to handle storm water, homes avoided damage.
There's certainly no arguing this. We did a renovation several years back at Deerpath Golf Course in Lake Forest, Ill. The course had been there since the 1930s but a hospital — basically a giant slab of concrete and hardtop — had since been built, and recently expanded, across the street. The runoff from these expansions was supposed to be contained, but in reality it caused flooding in the surrounding neighborhood and on the golf course.
In the end, it was the golf course that solved the problem. Lohmann Golf Designs built an elaborate, interlinked water storage system at Deerpath that gathered all that water, created an extraordinary new wetland habitat, and just happened to bring some nifty new risk/reward strategies to several holes. Pretty neat solution — better than costly storm-sewer upgrades.
But we did more than that: The on-course filtration capability we created through this series of interlinked waterways vastly improved the quality of the retained water. This matters, because no water storage system is entirely closed. At Deerpath it ultimately heads off site and into the Skokie River.
I bet the water retention and treatment capabilities at your course do many of these same things. Wouldn’t that make a great story in your local paper? Maybe you should write it up and submit that “story” as a column the next time stormwater retention and water quality issues are being discussed in your community.
•It has been pointed out in the past how a course can enhance green space rather than inhibit it, but the public needs to begin thinking about a golf course as green space… The average course covers 150 acres, approximately 100 acres of which are maintained turf grass. The remaining 50 acres are devoted to forests, woodlands and water bodies. In fact, more space is reserved for water bodies than tees and greens combined.
I’m betting every golf course in the country, public or private, can illustrate how its 150 acres are used as green/recreational space by the community. The ASGCA’s Talking Points detail some quite dramatic examples: how golf courses have served as breaks that inhibit wild fires, etc. But we all know the benefits are often more banal — like sledding or cross-country skiing, or maybe running through the sprinklers on a hot summer night. We work with several park districts that conduct wildly popular fishing derbies using ponds on their municipal golf courses.
We actually participated in an interesting illustration of this dynamic recently. We were retained by the Village of Bloomingdale, Illinois, to help decommission 9 of 36 holes at a resort facility in town. That’s right, they paid us to take golf holes out of use. Our role was limited: covering up bunkers and devising a grassing plan that was more or less self-sustaining. But the upshot is clear: Golf courses and parklands are one and the same (we kept the cart paths as walking paths), and that land was more valuable to the community as open space than it would be as a housing subdivision — despite what the village stood to gain in terms of property taxes – which, it turns out, will still be realized in the long-term as the resort’s new Hilton-status produced additional tourism dollars for the community. A win-win, really.
•The social and health benefits afforded by a golf course can easily be lost if they are not stated and repeated. According to “Eight Astonishing Benefits of Walking,” walking a golf course leads to better health; one researcher equated walking 18 holes to the value of 40-70% of an intense aerobics exercise class.
All true, but the social benefits of golf are shown to run much deeper when we get specific. Lohmann Golf Designs is a big supporter of Links Across America, which is part of The Wadsworth Golf Charities Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Wadsworth Golf Construction. Links Across America (LAA) works with cities and park districts to identify facilities that are worth saving and upgrading. LAA pulls in various golf industry firms (like us), plus grassroots organizations like the First Tee and local YMCAs, to put together plans for operating these facilities in conjunction with the municipalities, and upgrading them so they can optimally serve young, novice, underprivileged and handicapped golfers.
Lohmann Golf Designs was involved in the very first LAA project, The Links Learning Center at Randall Oaks, a universally accessible short course and golf practice facility that opened last summer in Dundee Township, Ill. Here’s an example of a park district actively and effectively reaching out to its community through its municipal golf course.
Links Across America is working on a bunch of similar programs, but I know that individual facilities across the country are using their course in similar ways. If that includes you and your course, don’t be so damned humble and quiet about it. Get out there and tell your neighbors.
