How will golf emerge from the pandemic?

A matter of opinion: The return OF GOLF

As clubs reopen after lockdown, a trio of managers consider what the next few months have in store

Golf in England and Wales is back and it’s on the way in Ireland too. As clubs wake up from their coronavirus-induced slumber, yet still under various restrictions until the summer, we asked a trio of managers to assess how the next few months will look and how the sport will emerge from the pandemic…

Golf clubs have reopened but restrictions remain in place. What are the opportunities and challenges now for your clubs? What does the next couple of months look like? Gareth Anthony: Membership is the key aspect for us because our renewals are due on April 1. We sent them out and the response has been pretty good. We’ve been getting quite a few applying for membership and that’s been really productive.

It’s all based around the membership for us. We won’t really be taking visitors for the foreseeable future.

We’ll have to see what impact of play on the course is, capacity-wise, before we decide about visitors. But there’s a great opportunity in terms of really driving the membership side. We’re not quite full yet. We’ve got around another 50 to go before we get there and, hopefully, we can recruit those before the end of April or early May. We’ll look at it, see financially where we stand, and how we can go about trading in the future. Chris White: The biggest immediate challenge is capacity. Our membership is completely full. We’ve got 50-odd people on our waiting list. That’s pretty unprecedented. We haven’t had that since the beginning of the 1990s. There’s going to be a lot of people wanting to get out and play.

Our membership is full but it’s quite diverse. We’ve got a lot of people who live away and a couple of hundred who are London way, which is two to three hours from us.

In Covid times, people who maybe had second homes in this part of the world decided they wanted to make this their primary residence. They’d rather be locked down by the seaside than in a city centre and the [case] rates have been lower here generally throughout.

We’ve got our own roadmap of what members can expect. They’ve got exclusive access to the golf course for at least the first two weeks.

After that, they will have another period of four weeks where they might be able to bring a guest.

From May 17 when, theoretically, the clubhouse reopens properly, we will be looking to take visitor income again.

Visitors are a big part of our club and we absolutely welcome them, but It’s a fine balance because the members are the ones who’ve had to put up with the closure - more so than anyone who would come and visit on a day.

But, obviously, visitor income hugely subsidises membership.

Capacity-wise, through the experience of the last year and seeing how things are going nationally, I’m mildly concerned about compliance with rules - on the basis that when there’s been nice weather in the last few weeks, the seaside has been rammed.

There’s a huge apathy towards the rules as they’re coming towards their natural conclusion. We’ve told all the members the rules England Golf have set out, but it’s a case of whether they will follow them.

In our average age demographic, most of our members will probably have been vaccinated by the time we return. Alistair Cook: One of the challenges we had was in terms of course set-up and getting winter projects done and getting the course in the best possible condition for when members return.

But the lead in time that Boris gave helped us as we essentially had five weeks to put lots of big holes in the greens and do a whole load of top-dressing.

That was one of my worries to begin with – when we didn’t know when golf was necessarily going to return.

We’ll have Augusta on the TV screens soon. I’m not sure we’re going to be Augusta standard because we’re up north in Yorkshire and spring doesn’t come along until about July!

Another of my worries was going to be twoball golf and how we were going to cope with that because it was madness trying to get members on with the demand. Fourballs is taking care of that.

We’re members only to begin with. Visitor revenue is a large amount of our income each year. It probably makes up about a third, so we want to have this back as soon as possible.

We’ve got a waiting list for membership. We’ve a lot of applications on the board already. We’ll be looking at that at some point in the summer to see if we can get any more members in once demand is gone.

Funnily enough, one of the things I’m worried about most is the World Handicap System. Members haven’t played under it yet. I think it’s a great thing but it’s quite confusing, and quite challenging, regarding how it all works. I think members getting used to it means we’re probably going to be spending a lot of time holding people’s hands.

Is that a similar situation for you, Chris and Gareth? Competitions are allowed straight away and golfers are going to want to be playing competitively pretty soon… CW: Our first competition is the Friday of the week we are coming back – because Easter weekend is an important one for our club. We’ve got four competitions in four days. We did actually get to the stage where we were playing a few non-qualifying type events before lockdown. So people were at least starting to use the new system.

What I couldn’t tell was if it was working or not. In those particular competitions, the scoring was really good. You could quite easily win a competition at Hunstanton with 37 or 38 [points] under the old system. Those we’ve run so far, were all 40s and mid 40s – which would be really unusual.

But, by the same token, they were also incredibly easy days. The jury’s out whether it was just because there was no wind, a nice day, a short course, or whether it’s because everyone’s course handicap is higher than they are used to playing to and suddenly

they’re getting a load more shots.

I don’t think it worries me too much, because it’s just a learning experience. As long as people can play competitively, I think they’re happy with that. GA: We’re starting competitions on the first Saturday, but we’ve got competitions on Saturday and Sunday.

When we went into lockdown, we were mostly on winter rules – so they weren’t really qualifying competitions. But I’m expecting it to be pretty rocky, in terms of holding people’s hands and getting them used to playing in the competitions, entering all the scores, and doing it all remotely.

Then for us, from an administration side, it’s closing the competitions and making sure they are working properly. I’m uneasy about it. CW: I think we’ve actually been quite lucky we’ve been shut because the weather’s been so horrible.

It’s the worst winter Norfolk has had in 160 years and our golf course has only been around 130. If we’d have been open any sooner than March 29, I’m not sure how much of a golf course we would have had.

But an extra five weeks for the run in has allowed us to finish all the winter work and it’s also meant that we’ve got a course.

I think it means members will be expecting it to be pristine: dead of summer, super greens, and all that.

I’ll tell you a little story from the first lockdown last year. Obviously, it was slightly different because it was essential maintenance only at that time.

We had two guys in and they were basically cutting the greens and fairways once a week. In the run up to reopening, we were cutting them every day like we normally do.

We cut our greens the same height all year, every day of the year. It’s always the same, never changes.

One of the first weeks back, somebody said ‘Oh, yeah, I can see we’re protecting the course – just left it a little longer while we’ve been closed. It’ll be nice when it gets back up to speed’.

The greens are still being cut at the same height. About two weeks later, he says ‘it’s nice to see they’re so much faster now we’re back playing’.

We’re going to see tremendous amounts of play over the next few months. The course has had time to breathe over lockdown but, if you’re getting fourballs every tee time for the first few weeks, how is it going to hold up? AC: It’s going to be a challenge. It’s had a very good rest but it’s been under snow and there’s been unprecedented amounts of rain.

It’s finally starting to dry out and we’re able to do lots of verti-draining and tining and it will get drier. But the grass hasn’t really started growing up here. We’ve still got some bare areas. As soon as play starts, those will just get magnified again.

There’s so much pent-up demand. We will be just as busy, if not busier, than we were in May. I don’t think people are going to start returning to work until probably May or June.

The course probably won’t win the battle and members will have to be understanding on that.

We’ve got increased daylight hours, so it’s not as if we’re going to get a natural restriction on numbers of people playing.

What will probably happen is as soon as member demand tails off, you start introducing members’ guests. After that, if demand starts tailing off and you’ve got capacity, you start introducing visitors.

You’re probably going to be at 100% capacity from now until the autumn. GA: I totally agree. Ours is a parkland course, and it’s recovered now. At the start of March, it was very wet. From chatting to members while they were paying their subscriptions, they were talking about TV golf and Bryson hitting the ball so far and the type of course they’re playing in America.

I hope they tone down the expectations when they come down.

We’ll have the greens good but they’re not going to be running at summer speeds. We know that. I just hope they realise that. Let’s move on to income generation. You’ll have subscriptions from members but not much else for the first couple of months. What gets you through until June when, hopefully, you can power up to full speed again? CW: We had our subscription renewal in December/January. So not the best timing this time round. The members have been amazing – they almost unanimously just paid and got on with it. The support the Government’s given to us, in terms

of wages and certain grants, means we’re OK for a period of time.

We’re anticipating that by about May we might be on half our revenue from green fees and then, from June onwards, back to normal.

We wouldn’t necessarily be a club that makes a huge amount of money out of bar and catering. When it’s closed, it’s not the end of the world. We are going to open something in April, though. That’s more a service to members, because they’ve had to put up with nothing for so long. They haven’t been able to come into the clubhouse since November.

Financially, we are budgeting on the basis of quite low uptake and quite conservatively in terms of when we might allow people to come back.

But, from June onwards, it’s pretty much full tilt. Obviously, there are always contingencies in budgets but we can certainly do without another lockdown. GA: Membership’s our number one source of income. We have a very busy food and beverage business. Covid had a massive impact on us.

But it also gave us a chance to realign and think about our business model. For the first time, last year, we started using an online booking app – and we got quite a number of bookings through that, which was excellent revenue for the club.

In lockdown number two and three, we started a takeaway Sunday lunch. Following that, we decided to have ‘takeaway Friday night’.

We had the idea of doing an

international meal every Friday night. We’ve done Brazilian, Italian, Cuban, Jamaican, Irish. We’ve had about 10 weeks where we’ve been doing it.

We’ve been able to get local people coming down to the club and collect it and the feedback we’ve had from the community has been tremendous.

We feel once we get back open, we might have a new revenue stream coming.

Just to give you an idea how successful it’s been, our food revenue last February – this is not including the bar – was £10,000.

This year, we took £9,000 in food revenue in February. Through only being open eight working days, we managed to generate £1,000 less than we did last year. AC: Our financial year runs from January 1 to December 31. In broad brush strokes, the furlough and government grants offset our loss of visitor and bar income. It just neutralised. This is going to be a different challenge. Are we going to lose more visitor income because of the pent-up demand? Possibly.

Another of the challenges, with our bar, is the waitress service that has been compulsory as part of Covid regulations and has become so incredibly popular that people want it permanently. As I’m sure you know, as soon as you put waitress service on at a private members’ club you actually lose money at the bar.

So that’s going to be really challenging for us. One good thing, and some people would criticise private members’ clubs for this, is that when we do open for visitors we charge headline rates – and they get taken up.

There’s no discounting of green fees. Sand Moor is not a traditional club that would discount green

frees anyway. But I should imagine we’ll be able to reclaim a lot of our loss of visitor income.

Finally, has what you’ve experienced in the last 12 to 15 months changed the golf club? Can you look forward with confidence? CW: I think the nature of the running of the club over the last year has perhaps been a bit more reactive than it would be in normal times.

There’s smaller involvement, from a smaller number of people on the board, following the guidance. There’s not really been many subcommittee meetings. There haven’t been too many board meetings. It’s been really good.

I think the board do see a value in a more modern approach to their governance of the golf club, in that respect.

We came from a position, a few years ago, where we had about 15 people on our board and it’s looking like, in the next year or two, we might be able to get that down to six or seven.

Then the people who are employed to do the job professionally, the staff, actually get left to run the club.

Our membership is thriving. We’ve got demand through the roof. The club’s in a great position. But people are very keen to get back to doing all the things they normally do in a golf club – matches, match meals, and just sitting in the bar on a Tuesday night watching Sky Sports.

They’ve definitely put up with it for the time being but I don’t think they would wear another one [lockdown] – I really don’t.

The club’s got a great opportunity going forward to use this to modernise. I’m sure a lot of clubs have done that.

I’m also a member of another club, which had never used tee booking before Covid. There’s no way they’d ever go away from it now.

So I hope clubs take that opportunity to look at what has been important to them. Areas in which they’ve probably tried to save money over the last year, when they’ve been worried about the future, perhaps they can do that as an ongoing exercise.

Broadly, it’s made people appreciate golf more. We’ve had people from other sports come to play golf. Cricketers, who weren’t able to play until quite a lot later in the summer last year, have started to play golf and realise you can’t get out first ball.

Golf’s in a great place going forward. AC: We’ve always heavily used technology so we didn’t need to change very much when the regulations changed. We probably use social media a lot more than before. We’re going to be redesigning our website, focusing on attracting new members, but also attracting visitors. There will probably be a greater emphasis on that.

We’ve had quite a few cricketers

– which is good in the Yorkshire area because there’s quite a big pool of them.

Is it going to fundamentally change? Are people going to go back to gyms, go back to playing cricket, go back to playing rugby? I don’t know.

I think a lot of that will dictate, as well as the Independent Golfer situation, as to whether the pool of golfers in the UK gets bigger or not.

If it does, I think that might be great for visitor income. I don’t think it’ll affect our membership criteria, because we’ve got full membership.

But other clubs in the area, where they’re struggling with membership, may get propped up like that.

If that pool doesn’t get bigger, I do fear for the survival of some of the clubs in our local area. If the number of golfers to choose from does go down, there may be a slimming down process of golf clubs.

Or it may have the opposite effect. There may be a lot more golfers out there to choose from. It’ll be interesting. GA: I’m very positive about it. Membership’s going to be strong. Green fees are going to be good. There’s going to be a lot of golf played. We’re going to be very busy. I’m really hopeful for the future.

The technology side is taking off – getting members to use BRS and use Club V1 has always been positive. I don’t think we are going to fall back into the old traps that we have before.

I’ve got a seven-man board. It’s really progressive. They’re really forward thinking and it’s just encouraging looking to the future. Meet The Panel

Chris White, secretary at Hunstanton, in Norfolk

Alistair Cook, club manager at Sand Moor, in Leeds

Gareth Anthony, general manager at Druids Heath, in Walsall