JZ Restaurants inked a five-year deal with the Kingston, N.Y., property to take over food-and-beverage operations, allowing membership dues to be lowered. The club is also offering a pool-only family membership available from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
Wiltwyck Golf Club in Kingston, N.Y., is tackling declining golf participation and membership numbers by outsourcing its food operation and offering a wider range of membership options, the Kingston-based Daily Freeman reported.
JZ Restaurants, which operates the Chateau and the Alexis Diner, has taken over Wiltwyck’s food and beverage operation, according to the club’s board president Stephen Diglio. Last month, JZ inked a five-year deal, with two more five-year options, to take over the food-and-beverage operation which includes the club’s foodservice employees, the Freeman reported.
The food-and-beverage operation, once a profit center, has become more of a break-even operation in recent years, Diglio said. For many years, the husband and wife team of Bert and Theresa Barone ran a highly successful food and beverage operation, but after they retired in the mid 1990s a long decline began, the Freeman reported.
During the next 20 years, the food-and-beverage operation operated with varying degrees of success as Diamond Mills and the Lazy Swan began to pick off a significant portion of their catering business, the Freeman reported.
“It was becoming hard to run a profitable operation,” Diglio said. “Since that time, we’ve decided it’s time to sell out that side of the business and focus on the golf club.”
After exiting the food and beverage business, Wiltwyck has lowered its dues on several memberships like a single golf membership, which went down from $5,600 to $3,995, the Freeman reported.
“This will make Wiltwyck more affordable to more golfers in the area,” Diglio said. “By outsourcing the food and beverage, this enabled us to do all of this.”
That’s led a significant uptick in the number of new membership applications, Diglio said, but Wiltwyck hasn’t escaped a nationwide decline in golf participation, the Freeman reported.
“The traditional golfing population is getting older,” Diglio said. “The upcoming generation, the millennials, are very focused on family activities. Children are playing multiple sports.”
This has meant in recent years the average new member now joins in their 40s or early 50s as opposed to their 30s in the past. Wiltwyck is combating this by taking advantage of its non-golf offerings like an Olympic-sized swimming pool and tennis courts. For the first time last year, Wiltwyck offered a pool-only family membership to families which was valid from Memorial Day to Labor Day, the Freeman reported.
Diglio hopes that some of the families with pool memberships will become interested in Wiltwyck’s 18-hole Robert Trent Jones Jr. course, which opened in 1954. It replaced the original nine-hole 1933 course that occupied land that was taken for the construction of the New York State Thruway, the Freeman reported.
“He built a premier 18-hole golf course in Ulster County and here we are 64 years later,” Diglio said. “We’re still the premier 18-hole golf course, and the only 18-hole private golf course, in the area.”
Over the decades the club has faced many ups in downs, including the departure of IBM in 1995, which drained the area of thousands of good paying jobs. During the peak years of IBM in the 1970s and 1980s, Wiltwyck had around 300 members and another 200-300 social members with a waiting list. Today those numbers have plummeted to 125 members and 50-75 social members, the Freeman reported.
“Dutchess Golf Club, founded in the 1800s closed last year,” Diglio said. “In order to stay in existence they have to think in new and imaginative ways,”
Wiltwyck has also tackled the decline by looking downstate to residents from New York City and its surroundings who have weekend homes locally. Looking ahead to the future Diglio said he’s seen data that shows that the golf population is stabilizing, ending several years of decline, the Freeman reported.
Wiltwyck actively seeks to grow youth interest in the sport by having members sponsor memberships for young golfers whose families are not members, the Freeman reported.
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