[Joe Hancock]

Combining several thoughts spurred on by other threads, I wonder if you fine folks could show and tell about those small town clubs you belong to. I'm not talking about the high end, on a list type clubs, I'm talking about the clubs such as Scott Szabo's club, Sterling CC in Sterling, CO. I am tempted to put a price limit on what you post as well, but I'm not familiar with club life and associated costs, so we'll leave that be.

Post a club link and a picture or two, and tell us why you belong. I like JK's comment in another thread about loving the people and not really giving two turds about the dirt......I am a self professed divot sniffer, so the dirt matters to me.

JK, you belong to some small clubs (at least one), so if you'd be so kind to share.

Thanks, and I'm looking forward to some pictures as it's a cold, snowy day.

Joe

[John Kavanaugh]

I don't have any pictures of Lawrence County Country Club which is also listed at Cross Roads in the Bendelow library.  It's so nice Stewart counted it twice.  At 216 members and a cost of $480 per year it is the model of efficiency.  We see that the forecast for Sunday is 62 deg on Sunday so 16 of us are going down to Evansville, In to play the upscale Liddy design called Cambridge.  Moving on up for some upscale weekend golf at $25 including cart.

The course is a nine green routing with 18 tees.  We have always been a gamblers, drinkers and sometime skirt chasers club with a poker game every day at noon.  The drinks are so strong that the board is concerned about losing money on a bottle of Crown.  I do think they lose money on Captain Morgan's but that may be because it is a younger mans drink.  I figure last year I spent 300 days at the club and played under 10 rounds of golf.  btw...We all own our own golf carts to keep our cost per round down.

[Mike Sweeney]

Between Shinnecock, National and Maidstone is.................Sag Harbor Golf Course

No longer belong, but used to keep a membership for 6:00AM rounds. Play 9 holes in 90 minutes, come back with the bagels for the (at that time) little kids. Wife and kids were happy, Dad was happy:



The Sag Habor State Golf Course is a 48.8 acre, 9-hole golf facility is located in the middle of a 341-acre parcel known as the Barcelona Neck Natural Resources Management Area. The property was acquired in 1989 by NY State. The golf course is entirely located in the Town of East Hampton in Suffolk County, New York.



$500,000+ STILL does not get you out at 6:00AM in The Hamptons.

There is also the fairly annual trip to Baby Yale:

http://golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,24426.0.html

[Michael Moore]

I am a member at Val Halla Golf & Recreation Center, owned and operated by the town of Cumberland. ME. The course is a Phil Wogan layout from the 1960s.

http://www.cumberlandmaine.com/valhalla.cfm

Membership is $699, and in the spirit of community supported agriculture, just $500 if you pay in the autumn for the following year.

The junior programs for boys and especially girls are the best in the state by a wide margin. They host the Junior Am, run countless clinics and camps, and are the home course for any number of school teams.

Every Saturday morning there is a sanctioned and hotly contested $10 pins and skins game.

The food is good and the beer is cold.

I joined because it is ten minutes from my office, it is wildly affordable, you can hit driver 13 times, several of my friends and many of my colleagues are members, and they allow early early AM play as long as you do not bean the kid on the mower.

[Adam Clayman]

Scott's Szabo's Sterling CC is an interesting study. My feelings are the course is much better than what is currently presented. The reason is the terrain. Character abounds with decent movement both vertically and horizontally. The greens defend themselves well with decent undulations along with their sizes. The issue, as I'm sure exists nearly everywhere in this country, is the mis-perception that cutting down the trees, opening up the corridors, will render the course too easy. This is a myth of Trumpian proportions and is pure poppycock.
 

[Steve Kline]

I am a member at Ivy Hills C.C. in Cincinnati. As a junior member my dues are $205 per month. I pay range fee of about that amount once a year in April. I don't know how to post photos but here is a link to some http://www.ivyhillscountryclub.com/fw/main/Golf_Course_Photo_Gallery-62.html. It was designed by Steve Smyers and has some interesting architectural features but it has some really wretched holes too. Plus, the course conditioning is generally sub par - definitely not F&F. The course is built on the side of hill (roughly 300 ft from top to bottom). The greens have plenty of slope and require accurate placement to keep from three putting.

The club is less than 15 minutes from my house and 3 minutes from my office. Between the closeness and the price, that is why I'm a member. Also, I run a Saturday morning game for single digit handicaps. We usually have 8-12 guys that I pair randomly in A and B players. We a one best-ball $5 nassau and an indivual $10 skins game. That game is a ton of fun and just enough competition/money to help me focus and my game improve.

[Chris_Blakely]

John,

Stewart took some liberties with the Bendelow course list like including most of the Langford & Moreau courses that were done when they were at the American Park Builders and predated Bendelow's arrival.  However, I have found several Bendelow courses in my area that he knew nothing about.  Thus, I would guess that it all comes out in the wash.

Chris

[Ian Andrew]

I will be joining North Ridge Golf Club - the local municipal course in town - with my son this year. This is my first full year living in Brantford. The course has wonderful undulation in the fairway and particularly on the back nine, two really great shot par fours, is lined completely with mature trees with lots of width between tree lines, it has fall away greens, plateau greens, pitch greens and a crowned green. The only weakness is a lack of length in places - which is something that they could easily fix without screwing up any of the holes (it has great elasticity as Wayne would say).

[John Kavanaugh]

John,

Stewart took some liberties with the Bendelow course list like including most of the Langford & Moreau courses that were done when they were at the American Park Builders and predated Bendelow's arrival.  However, I have found several Bendelow courses in my area that he knew nothing about.  Thus, I would guess that it all comes out in the wash.

Chris

Only 20 miles from LCCC/Cross Roads Stewart counted the single Quail Creek and Robinson CC as two courses.  I don't get the need to exagerate to make up for misques.  I guess writing a book is hard.

[Chris_Blakely]

John,

Stewart took some liberties with the Bendelow course list like including most of the Langford & Moreau courses that were done when they were at the American Park Builders and predated Bendelow's arrival.  However, I have found several Bendelow courses in my area that he knew nothing about.  Thus, I would guess that it all comes out in the wash.

Chris

Only 20 miles from LCCC/Cross Roads Stewart counted the single Quail Creek and Robinson CC as two courses.  I don't get the need to exagerate to make up for misques.  I guess writing a book is hard.

I do not know if the doubling up on course counting and including L&M courses were intentional exagerations or simply because it must have been hard to confirm that many courses.  My point was that the order of magnitude of the total number of courses is most likely close to what Bendelow actually did.

[Tim Leahy]

Here's a great website for this thread, you just put in the course name and you can get a satellite picture of most courses in the US.

http://www.golflink.com/golf-courses/

[John Kavanaugh]

In true LCCC tradition our Friday evening cocktail hour ended with foot races in the parking lot.  Only one face plant was achieved.

[Tim Nugent]

I'm currently working on a club in downstate Illinois which has all the idiocentricities of a small town club. These seem to stem from the fact that unlike big city clubs, all the memebers know each other - many from the time they were kids -and therefore their life story - outside the club .  They also have a large demographic - from millionaires to school teachers.  This causes some friction because there isn't a single mission statement for the club.  Some of them want to keep things a cheap as possible while others want Augusta.

You will find that people will want to make it possible for friends and extended family to also belong - even if realistically beyond their means - by cutting expenses to the bone.  This pisses off other half who want it nicer so they aren't embarrassed to entertain friends and do business at the club.

The problem with most small town clubs is there isn't an alternative.  The population can only economically support 1 club.  So they all have to learn to live with each other.  There is a great fear of losing members.  Although the project we embarked on is huge for them and will radically change the course, over 90% of the voting members approved it.  You would think with a mandate like that, the 10% would go along.  Nope. They are constantly complaining, spreading false rumors and playing the ever popular small club game of "gotchya".  They interesting thing is that yes they did lose 6 old members - but they gained 9 new members.  This is while other clubs in the region are struggling.

I think you will find that many retired members are just looking for a place to get out of the house.  They aren't that interested in course conditions.  But the downfall of these clubs comes when that class of member gains control and allows the course, clubhouse, and maintenance equipment to deteriorate.  In essence, they are playing a round of golf for less than the cost  to produce a round.  Eventually someone down the road is going to have to pay the piper.  Discourage enough of the younger members and they might go out and build a new club.

[Joe Hancock]

Selfishly, I'm enjoying the stories along with the course info.

JK, I don't do poker or booze very well, but I think I could enjoy LCCC a lot.

Tim Nugent, I appreciate the insight into small town people dynamics, and if I look back on my career, which included several small town courses, I think you're observations make perfect sense. And, while often in conflict and less than ideal, it may be those people differences that equate to the charm of the small town clubs.

Anxious to hear more,

Joe

[Tim Nugent]

Joe, you're absolutely correct.  Even more so, I believe that these clubs provide an invaluable social service that is intregal to help keep these small towns from vibrant.  Where else in a town of 20,000 can somebody can you interact with such a wide spectrum of people? Plus if you need a car, the local dealers a memeber, if you need some other professional or even tradesman, odds are they are members.  And as was mentiioned earlier, they are where all the local area schools practice and play their matches.  Without that, odds are many high school kids would not ever pick up golf.   As the parks director in a mid-sized town said once, "this is a static population, we have to develop our next generation of golfers if we are to survive".

I probably learned more about the business world (and human nature) from my days as a caddy at Onwensia Club as a "fly on the wall" carry a bag for 4 hrs than my friends who were down at the park playing ball.

There's more to a club than just a place to play golf.

[Tags:]

Tags:

[Tags:]

Tags:

Call to undefined function theme_linktree()