The year 2018 will be remembered as the one where winter didn’t want to leave, and spring stubbornly refused to arrive completely.
While many golfers were somewhat grumpy, it really made those who operate golf courses in Alberta quite annoyed to say the least.
“It’s extremely frustrating,” said Lesley McMahon who runs the family-owned Balmoral Golf Course just east of Red Deer. “We’ve had many years when we’ve opened in April and then had a snowstorm and closed again.”
Balmoral Superintendent Andy Watson has 36 years under his belt at the course and he says this is the latest start to a season he can recall. His take on this is quite grounded.
“The thing is I know I can’t do much about it,” he said, joking about the global warming factor we all read about. “We can’t do much about it. All we can do is wait but as long as a wait as it’s been, everything looks good out there.”
So, this wintery death grip is a whole new experience. One which golf course operators really can’t fully prepare for.
“When we do our budgeting and financial planning we never count on April or October because either one of them is a question mark(weather-wise). May through August are months we can count on,” said McMahon. “We look at October as a bonus, but we do count on April as a normal start.”
Many in the industry will tell you a day in the spring is worth a week in the fall but when spring doesn’t happen until later, much later than normal, you must try to make up for lost time, she said.
“All you can do is be creative and try to come up with new ways to bring in revenue when you are open and keep the course looking good and make little changes you can afford to make and just push on.”
When it comes to the physical nature of the course, Watson says the longer the snow sits on the grass, the better chance a course can get snow mould. He added the light snowfall at the start of winter meant the snow wasn’t covering fairways and greens for a much longer period. So, that is a positive.
Then you must factor in the employment side of things in an industry which is very much seasonal.
“People are looking for other work because we can’t hire them for a month or whatever, so they make look for work elsewhere,” he said.
Getting the course ready for the season relies on the snow being gone but Watson says usually a lot of prep work is done by the start of May, so this will change the work pattern.
“Yeah, it will be compressed quite a bit and we’ll see what we can do,” he said.
Adding to the difficulty caused by a fickle Mother Nature is the fact while most businesses are open year-round, golf courses have that five or six-month window to make their money so budgeting is crucial.
“I mean, we could miss half a month of July, it could just rain, so we have to be very good budgeters. It’s tough because you never know what’s coming,” said McMahon.
She says if you are the last course to stay open in October you can see some extra traffic from players whose courses have closed for winter. However, it’s never going to be enough to make up for all the lost tee-times caused by such a late start.
“There’s no insurance for this so you just have to be really careful and creative, so you try to pack in as much as you can during the months you are open and hope for the best,” she said.
So, one might ask, given all the opportunities for things to go wrong, why stay in the business?
“Well, I come from a farm family so that probably helps with the insanity of actually wanting to do this for a living,” she laughed. “It’s a really awesome job. It really is. For me it’s a family legacy and, I just love our customers.”
Let the golfing begin.
