I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts about the major changes and trends you think you’ll encounter in your jobs ten years from now.
It was April 2005, and most of the world was looking for white smoke, as Pope John Paul II had died and a papal conclave had gathered to select his successor.
I was ready to send up my own white smoke as a sign of surrender, after not having any success lining up a club to be featured in the inaugural issue of Club & Resort Business.
After we had decided to create C&RB, I attended the Club Managers Association of America conference earlier that year in New Orleans and introduced myself to dozens of club general managers. I described how we were planning a new publication that would feature a club and its management team each month. Everyone I met was cordial, but it was clear that I was seen as an outsider and an unknown quantity, and that most would prefer to let someone else “go first” and then see what we would be all about.
I was getting close to praying for a miracle, but then I drove by the club that’s closest to where I live— Waynesborough CC in Paoli, Pa., and realized that 1) they were about to complete a major clubhouse renovation and 2) I knew their current Board President.
That got me in the door and helped put us on the map. And from there, it’s been a whirlwind of great experiences that, amazingly, has now extended to ten full years.
The reaction to our first issue was instantly gratifying. I had many more doors opened to me immediately, and the industry has been nothing but welcoming, accommodating and respectful of C&RB ever since.
As our recap of our first ten years in the April issue shows (“Defining Decade”), we’ve had no shortage of interesting topics and developments to follow in what has certainly been a challenging and eventful period. We also had fun for this article taking a look ahead at what the next ten years may bring for the club business in various areas—and I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts about the major changes and trends you think you’ll encounter in your jobs a decade from now.
Looking back at some of my most memorable personal experiences since we began publishing C&RB, I have to start with my descent in 2006 down a tiny, slippery ladder on the back of the famous floating green at Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene Resort, after which I squeezed myself through a small trap door, to view the control room and programmable mooring system inside the green that’s used to move it via cables to a different spot each day. One false step and I would have ended up in Lake Coeur d’Alene, and may not have made it through year two.
There was also an exhausting week of endless sandwich making while “embedded” as part of the culinary team serving the members’ hospitality tent at Merion Golf Club during the 2013 U.S. Open. And most recently, I took participatory journalism to new depths (of temperature), when I tried out the new $50,000 cryotherapy machine at Sea Island (Ga.) Resort. (You stand in it, in just your skivvies, for three minutes while liquid nitrogen swirls clouds of -220º F mist all around you. It’s being promoted as an anti-inflammatory treatment for golfers, and you can read more about it in an upcoming feature on Sea Island that we’ll have later this year.)
So who wouldn’t want to look forward to ten more years of experiences like that? Thanks again for making us feel so welcomed and appreciated once we came on the scene, and I’ll look forward to hopefully having an opportunity to share future memories and thoughts about the business in person at your location sometime soon.
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