EDUCATION SPOTLIGHT Bridging The Gap

A Long Island Club’s Foundation Introduces Youth to Golf, Good Work … And A Sustainable Life

Something special continues to play out on a storied strand of grass, heather and sand on the South Fork of Long Island known as The Bridge, a private golf club founded in 2002 by a former Wall Street trader, lifelong car lover, art collector, author and philanthropist named Bob Rubin. From day one Rubin committed to making The Bridge as sustainable as possible, and in 2005 it became the first Long Island private club to earn Audubon International Signature Sanctuary Certification, which it retains to this day.

Today the 520-acre former racetrack boasts a waiting list for members drawn to its reputation as the “counterculture” club in the otherwise staid and tradition-drenched Hamptons. Rees Jones’ original design has been reworked and updated over the years, including an extensive bunker overhaul in 2014, earning Top 100 rankings along the way, but one thing hasn’t changed—the club’s, and Rubin’s, dedication to environmental sustainability.

In 2015, Rubin broke big ground yet again.

With buy-in from his membership, he started The Bridge Golf Foundation (BGF, also known as Bridge Golf Harlem), which Rubin describes as “an intensive, year-round, multi-year program, organized around the game of golf but with a strong academic component, for underserved young men of color.” Today he shares Executive Director duties with his wife, Stéphane Samuel, who is also Director of Academics. “She runs the Foundation day to day, Rubin said. “I mostly focus on keeping the lights on now.”

Enrollees spend three hours after each high school day at the Foundation’s headquarters on 116th Street in Harlem for 90 minutes of academics and 90 minutes honing golf skills on state-of-the-art simulators. In season they shuttle twice a week to metropolitan area munis for the real thing. Each year, all students spend several summer weeks at the club, living in dorms built especially for them, learning the game under the tutelage of longtime Director of Golf Michael Sweeney, and gaining valuable interpersonal skills working in the club’s golf operations as well as caddying for members. Some students take a shine to the course maintenance and agronomy side of the club’s operation, working alongside Superintendent Gregg Stanley to learn the stewardship ropes.

When Kat Welch, Director of Signature Sanctuary Certification, and Environmental Program Specialist Sarah Honan made a site visit to The Bridge in early 2023, the Foundation, and the club’s overarching culture of inclusion and education, made a big impression.

“I was thoroughly impressed by their efforts, not only environmentally, but also with the unique outreach and education program they have in place,” Welch said. “They are an incredible Signature Sanctuary Certification example, and a great partner.”

As summer wound down, Rubin discussed his and the club’s unwavering commitment to sustainability, and why The Bridge Golf Foundation is so special, so important, and such a worthy model for golf-based youth education within and beyond the private club sector.

Your partnership with Audubon International goes back to 2005, when the course was originally certified. How would you describe that partnership?

We were the first bronze Signature course in New York, and we’re very proud of that for many reasons. For instance, our nitrogen levels are very low — the state standard is 10 and our self-imposed standard is two. Our wildlife is off the charts. We have a family of about six foxes. We have an osprey cam online. You can see their family on the seventh hole. We’ve tried to introduce quail because they were once native to this area.

The Bridge is an unusual piece of property, with large contiguous areas of low bush. You don’t get that in the suburbs. You get protected forests, but you don’t get that kind of intermediate terrain, which was here before they planted all the woodlot forests. So it’s a unique parcel. The maintained turf is only 80 acres of 520 acres — 15 percent of the property is maintained and the rest of it is completely natural. I have a full brake/full gas philosophy to landscaping the Bridge. Either it’s maintained or it’s not maintained. It’s not “kind of” maintained. There’s nothing here that’s not native.

We cut out a lot of overgrowth last winter. The golf course is a lot more linksy now. We have big waste bunkers that we didn’t have before, but the sand was there. We didn’t have to create them, we just dug down to them, and it improved the golf experience. Gregg Stanley even left select pines and low bush cover in strategic spots inside some of the vast bunkers, which has a great “scenographic” impact.

It’s a very minimalist golf course. It has 16 and a half “found” holes and one and a half “created” holes. I know it’s become a cliché of golf architecture, but we moved little or no earth. There’s 155 feet of natural elevation change on the property!

When Audubon International visited there last spring to finalize the course’s recertification, they were quite impressed with the Foundation and the educational work you do there. How does this tie into what they do, the whole sustainability side? How does stewardship tie in with the entire scope of your education?

The Bridge Golf Foundation is a sports-based youth development program. So there’s the sport, which is the carrot, and there’s the academic preparation, which is the stick, and then there’s the whole piece of character development—preparing these young men for the bigger world out there.

Living and studying at The Bridge has at least two outcomes. One, they become better golfers. Two, they learn life skills. Through internship they put money in their savings accounts. They learn to live away from home in a dormitory and take care of their food and their shelter. They also learn how to interact with people in a professional environment, interacting with members and staff, and they’re cultivating relationships with members, who reciprocate with offers of internships and hopefully jobs. They’ll do much better in job interviews. That’s how it works.

How many interns on property this year?

We had 25 in total including our college students who return as counselors, but a dozen at any one time. One of them, Steevens Remelus, an avid gardener, interned for our superintendent, Gregg Stanley. He volunteers at an urban farm on Randall’s Island in New York City. He is interested in nature, so instead of putting him on the golf operation the whole time he was here, he worked with Gregg to learn about how we grow grass, how we maintain the course, and set it up, and irrigate it.

How does the Bridge Foundation integrate the natural environment, on and off the golf course, into the students’ learning experience?

They enjoy going to the beach. They play golf outdoors during the year. They go to what are essentially public parks—Mosholu, Dunwoodie, Split Rock, other muni courses in and around the boroughs. We do a park cleanup in New York and help organize some community service. Some of them go to schools that have community service requirements. We go to several different parks in and around Harlem to work out before they do their indoor golf instruction. We do cleanup and interact with community organizers—the 116th street cleanup, for instance. We’re instilling in them a custodial sense of their environment and their local parks.

How did your organization fare during the Covid-19 shutdown?

We were a Covid success story because you could play golf during Covid. We were probably the only sports-based youth development operation open during the height of the lockdown. We were remote every day. We had people from all walks of life talking to them. We tried to keep it interesting online, which is hard because they had other online school commitments. But we thought we did a pretty good job of holding their attention.

Going back to the golf course maintenance side, how many kids get involved in that? They want to see how water is distributed and how mowing patterns are and how wildlife is taken care of?

We have a few kids who have shown an interest in that. When a student shows interest, we take notice. We would love to send some of our current high schoolers to turf management programs in college. Golf is a multi-billion-dollar industry, with equipment, golf course operations, but also turf management. We encourage that.

Do you hear intimations outside the club that other clubs want to take on something like this, and use The Bridge Golf Foundation as a model?

A film by The Golfers Journal in 2022 prompted a couple of inquiries. One from St. Louis, for example. It’s a great idea, but it’s a lot of elbow grease. My wife and I work very hard at this.

You don’t even really need to own a golf course to do it. Having a golf club that partners with you is good, but if you went to another inner-city location, you could have a local muni and a Topgolf, and a PGA pro who wants to give back and have a high school golf team in an urban setting, which is what we do. There’s a lot of focus on HBCU [Historically Black College and University] golf teams—high visibility activity and fundraising. But where do the players come from? They’ve got to come from high schools. The barriers to entry are lower. The costs are lower. If you want to play golf in college, you should play it in high school.

Eight years into this cycle, what will close the circle for you as you follow the kids as they go out into the world, would it be like a couple of kids coming back and working there eventually?

We have that already. It’s an important element of the foundation that the older kids help the younger kids. So they come back as counselors in training. We follow them through college. A couple of them spent the whole summer working for us. Our oldest kids are about to graduate from college next June, and we follow them. We help them. We provide funding for college because full rides are never full rides. And when it’s time for them to get a job, we’ll help with that. So what will close the circle is to see them enter the workforce and raise families.

And hopefully keep golf as part of their life.

They all play. We’re a sports-based youth development group, and we’re growing. We’re seeking support outside of the Bridge family. But we’re not selling a big growth story or a big rinse and repeat story. We’re selling a “deep dive with a small number of kids” story.

This interview has been edited and organized for clarity and continuity.

Sustainable Indoors and Out

Many factors go into attaining Audubon International Signature Sanctuary Certification. The Bridge Golf Club reached that milestone in 2005 and has maintained its Bronze certification status for nearly two decades. Here founder Bob Rubin shares a few examples of sustainable practices that are woven into the club’s DNA.

TURF MANAGEMENT

• Just 80 acres of maintained turf on 550 acres

• Overall landscaping policy is “very simple: either maintained golf grasses (15 percent of overall site) or fully natural — no flowers or other imported nonnative plants”

WATER

• The Bridge has pulled about 6,500 samples since its original construction under a tripartite water monitoring agreement with Suffolk County Water Authority and The Town of Southampton, New York

• The New York State standard for nitrogen in drinking water standard is 10 ppm. The Bridge self-imposed standard is just 2 ppm, “which we easily beat most of the time.”

• The clubhouse’s various roof shapes collect rainwater and divert to biofilters, which return the filtered water to the aquifer.

• Installed water stations and banned plastic water bottles at the club.

• Closed loop wash system at cart barn

PLANTS &WILDLIFE

• Active Osprey nest and a live YouTube Osprey camera

• Club is home to hawks, turtles, snakes, turkeys and countless other wildlife

• Active wildlife corridors throughout property

• Working to reintroduce quail to the site—The Bridge’s low bush cover is perfect for them and increasingly rare in the Hamptons

• Priority is native plants and diversity is extensive: bayberry, low bush blueberry, heath, bluestem, fescues, specimen pitch pine (a vulnerable and rare variety of pine)

CLUBHOUSE & BUILDING CONSTRUCTION

• All building materials recyclable LED lighting

• All of the main spaces in the clubhouse have transom windows allowing for maximum natural light

• Student housing built from modular shipping containers