BACK TO
GOLF’S
FUTURE BY PAT JONES
L
et’s jump into Marty McFly’s DeLorean for a minute and take a spin back to 2019. There (then?) we would find 2019 Pat Jones giving the same state of the industry speech he’d been giving for five years. In a nutshell: n
Courses were slowly dying off because play had been sluggish for years but this was actually healthy in the long run to normalize supply and demand
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Supers’ biggest problem was labor and the possibility of mandatory $15 minimum wage
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Baby boomer supers were starting to retire
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Budgets were largely flat
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We were at the tail-end of a decade-long remodeling boom that made Gil Hanse rich
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Robot mowers and autonomous operations were the future
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On the bright side, a few more women and girls were coming to the game and golf as exercise was growing in popularity.
Then the thing happened and lots of stuff changed. Let’s review. First, everyone needs to get one fact straight: the pandemic didn’t save golf…superintendents saved golf. Supers are, first and foremost, problem-solvers and the craziness of March 2020 demanded that big problems be solved fast and cheap. You folks, with a handful of staff, showed up and kept the big green things alive and viable as businesses. Golf should be forever grateful to its turfheads. But don’t hold your breath. And, what’s more, the years of grassroots work, participation in state and national lobbying and relationship-building by supers and associations paid off in spades. In many regions, chapters took the lead in responding on behalf of the other
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Michigan Golf Course Superintendents Association
| www.migcsa.org
