In its “Seven Thoughts” feature, the publication interviewed Jeff Clifton about the Birmingham, Ala., club’s $4 million investment and hosting the Regions Tradition from 2016 to 2018.
Greystone Golf & Country Club in Birmingham, Ala., will host the Regions Tradition from 2016 through 2018, but that is not what drove the $4 million investment the club will make into upgrades and enhancements to its facilities, the Birmingham Business Journal reported.
Jeff Clifton, President, says this project has been in the making for several years, with the announcement of the popular golf event only speeding the process up for the club. The Business Journal interviewed Clifton recently as the club prepares for the makeover and the Regions Tradition, and gathered these “seven thoughts”:
- Bringing the Regions Tradition back gave us the push to do it. Really we’ve known we needed to make some improvements for a number of years, and we’ve had some surveys we’ve done to the membership as far back as three or four years ago, identifying areas that needed to be improved. With the tournament coming, it’s a great time to do it. Trying to put on a great tournament, and to maximize our revenue sharing with the tournament, we need this facility to be able to do that. We’ve kind of fast forwarded the timeline on what we already knew what we needed to do.
- Regions is a great sponsor. They wanted to keep it in town. When they approached us about bringing it back here, we were very excited and jumped on the opportunity. As far as the club, and the greater Greystone neighborhood, it’s excellent. It’s going to help us drive membership, it’s going to help our property values, and for greater Birmingham it’s great. We’re keeping the tournament in town. We did it so well when we had the Brunos (tournament) here for 13 years. We think we can recreate that.
- We use our dues to run our operations side. That’s day-to-day expenses. The $4 million is capital improvements. We have a monthly capital improvement fund that we use and we’ve been banking. That money that we bring in every month from our members will be used to service this debt without having to increase that number. As for now, there won’t be any monthly increase in what people are paying, or assessments.
- It was very apparent the things we need to improve on—which were some amenities within our clubhouse. We needed a casual dining area that people knew they could go everyday. Our cart barn is in the basement, which is a very expensive square-foot cart barn. So to get the space to do what we wanted to do in the clubhouse, we’re building a new golf operations facility. It’s a little more than just a cart barn.
- We came up with trying to be a club of excellence for our members in everything that we do. Our golf facilities are already top notch. We have two of the better courses, we think, in the Southeast, but there were some other areas where we did not feel like we were meeting that standard. That’s part of our build program. We’re trying to drive our food and beverage, our tennis facility and everything we do to what our members would think would be excellent service and excellent standards.
- As far as hosting a major PGA stop, we haven’t thought that far down the road yet. At this point, we just want to do a good job from 2016 through 2018. At that time, we’ll look at where we are. We’d love to keep a tournament here. We’re hoping that Regions will re-up after that and stay. We’ll have a course that will be championship caliber when we get our upgrades done.
- We’ve hosted a major PGA stop before. We know that Birmingham will come out for those kind of events, if done correctly. I don’t see a reason why Birmingham couldn’t host. We have enough good courses in town that they could.
Tell Us What You Think!
You must be logged in to post a comment.