We have done several courses that have junior tees, the holes range anywhere from 50-250 yards. Here are some of the courses:
Prairie Lakes Golf Course - Grand Prairie, Texas
Oak Grove Country Club - New Boston, Texas
Cleburne Golf Links - Cleburne, Texas
Kiahuna Golf Club - Poipu Beach, Hawaii
Overall it has been very positive and we have gotten some good feedback. Here is an interesting article written on junior tees:
NOTHING SHORT OF PROGRESS
ClubCorp champions a new set of forward tees
Feb 1, 2008
By: David Frabotta
Golfdom
ClubCorp is making its golf courses shorter and easier. Way shorter, less than 5,000 yards in most cases.
What would inspire this stark contrast to the rest of the industry? The answer is member recruitment and retention, crucial components to growing the game.
In an effort to shorten rounds and offer more flexibility for beginning golfers, ClubCorp is installing far-forward tees as part of its Short Course Initiative.
It's no secret that golf demand is flat, and golf courses are closing faster than they are opening for the second-consecutive year. The biggest reasons, sources say, stem from time scarcity.
Thus far, the industry has responded to America's virtual time poverty by building longer, tougher golf courses, which largely have cannibalized shorter, easier layouts. That trend has hampered rounds at public facilities. And private clubs are experiencing a shakeout, too. Fewer traditional country club members are willing to forgo weekends with family to golf as often as they did in the
past.
"My father was an avid golfer. I can't image the amount of laughter that would have taken place if I asked him to give up his weekend golf to watch me play soccer," says Frank Gore, ClubCorp's executive vice president of membership and sales. "Conversely, my daughter played
soccer for six years without ever scoring a goal, but I never missed a game. It's different now, and we saw a lot of this prioritizing what's important after 9/11."
Indeed, golf was never better around the turn of the millennium. But its current slump has many industry observers wondering if it will ever return to its glory days. Myriad task forces, think tanks and even formal entities have been devising ways to grow the game. The result has been a host of marketing initiatives, but the really big changes — like shaking the game of its traditional six-hour obligation — has been largely academic with the exception of a few golf courses.
That's about to change. This spring, more than 90 of ClubCorp's managed properties will offer a new set of forward tees, typically 100 yards closer to the green than the previous forward tees.
"We're trying to get people to play a nine-hole round in an hour and 15 minutes or less," Gore says. "It's not just for kids and for beginners. It's also for people with less time. You're basically playing a high-quality, 3-par course, which provides a combination of speed and lower difficulty."
With each year, more members are downgrading their memberships from golf memberships to less-expensive social memberships, Gore says. Of those who keep their golf memberships, more of them are playing a mere 18 rounds to 24 rounds a year. That's about $400 per round with dues. That's a tough sell considering the glut of upscale daily-fee or semi-private courses that opened in the past decade, most of which can be played for about $100, depending on the market.
In an effort to reverse that trend, ClubCorp knows that members who regularly show up to use at least part of the club are more likely to retain their full memberships because they perceive more value in club amenities and facilities than infrequent users. Far-forward tees allow members to use the facility more often: Dad can play in about an hour after work and still attend evening obligations, or kids can play along with dad without holding up play. Both scenarios keep members coming to the club more often.
Only a big management company like ClubCorp can give a program like this a national identity and help it root among average golfers, but the idea of forward tees is not new. In New Boston, Texas, The Oak Grove Golf Club, owned and operated by Jeff Prieskorn, has operated with kids' tees for almost a decade.
When Oak Grove hired golf course architect John Colligan to build a second nine and refurbish the original nine in 1998, Prieskorn thought it would be a good idea if his oldest son (now age 18) and his friends could have a place to golf without holding up the pace of play. So he installed tee boxes on the sides of fairways adjacent to landing areas used by golfers hitting from the traditional tees. He hid them with mounding so they wouldn't be a distraction from the back tees.
Eventually, the golf course's reputation grew as a kid-friendly place, and kids helped supplement historically slow tee times, mainly in the evenings.
"We have kids as young as 8 that play by themselves," Prieskorn says. "Many of them play faster than the men because their holes are so short."
The semi-private Oak Grove has 250 members, and Prieskorn says membership growth and retention has been better than competing golf courses in the area because the family golf concept is such a good selling point when potential members inquire about joining.
Others at the club are starting to use the far-forward tees, too. Families and area high-school golf teams often use them for practice. And one senior member — 92 years young — was close to retiring his clubs before Prieskorn offered him the short-course perspective.
"He was frustrated because he could barely hit the ball out of his shadow anymore, about 100 yards off the tee," Prieskorn says. "He was ready to quit, and he told me, 'If I can't play, then I'm going to go home and die in my La-Z-Boy.' "
Thanks to the forward tees, that member continues to hit the links.
The concept has worked so well for Oak Grove that Colligan Golf Designs has mimicked the layout for several other clients. "
It doesn't take much of a sell because it doesn't cost anything during the renovation process, and it offers some flexibility on the course as well as a marketing tool down the road," Colligan says.
The Prairie Lakes Golf Course in Grand Prairie, Texas, a municipal facility, features new junior tee boxes by Colligan. The tees are used by men working on their short game and beginners as well as kids. Its 27 holes allow the course to use the forward tees on nine holes on slow days while maintaining a regulation golf course for traditionalists.
Colligan helped christen the new tees with a round of golf after his job was done — nine holes from the men's tees and nine holes from the far-forward tees.
"I'm not sure I played much different from the forward tees," he says. "What I noticed was it helped with the intimidation factor, and it brought a lot of the fun back into the game. Golf should be enjoyed, not endured."
ClubCorp isn't exactly flying blind on the private club side. The company already champions The Clubs of Kingwood (Texas) as the most kid-friendly complex in the country, so it has some experience empowering its junior members. At the Shores course at The Clubs of Kingwood at Atascocita, kids actually get to drive the golf car thanks to a fleet of 20 special vehicles that feature a courtesy brake on the passenger side. The facility also has family golf cars that allow foursomes to ride together.
The Shores course completes its setup with tee boxes, fewer bunkers and one-height mowing for fairways and rough. Only tees and greens are mowed differently to make it easier for juniors and novices.
But unlike most of its properties, Kingwood has 117 golf holes, which allows ClubCorp to dedicate its nine-hole Shores course to family golf and kids play. But Shores will be the anomaly in the ClubCorp portfolio. For now, the company's other properties will simply mow out teeing areas instead of building tee boxes, and it will complete the teeing area with ball washers and benches. That way, each facility will be able to gauge adoption by measuring rounds and gathering feedback from members before constructing new tees that might not be used.
"Kingwood has had a very good increase in retention, so that's one of the key components driving this," says Mark Burnett, executive vice president of the golf and country club division at ClubCorp. "The more that you can give the spouse or the kids ways to increase the country club-usage patterns, then you can build the longer-term benefit of retaining and recruiting golfers."
Burnett is charged with implementing the Short Course Initiative. He's begun the process at a handful of clubs so far, and he expects each of the company's more than 90 clubs to be up and running this spring.
Burnett says the short-course concept is just one incentive to bolster value for club members. He's also consulted with clubs in his portfolio to create three-hole and six-hole routes, as well as upgrade practice facilities when appropriate.
All the initiatives aim to alleviate the time commitment that traditional golf requires. Golf purists likely will resist many of the changes coming down the pike. But amid slowing demand, shrinking supply and an uncertain economy, the game might need to change to ensure its survivability.
"There are some people who are in total denial about golf and think that it will come back to the level it was," Gore says. "But we (at ClubCorp) don't believe it will unless we change."