The new challenge for many clubs is to get construction underway to maximize their future appeal, while minimizing the disruption or annoyance factor for all those who now want to use the club.
Where club managers were hyper-focused just a year ago on preparing for the worst while scrambling to find new ways to make the best out of a situation that was not only unprecedented, but unnerving, many now find themselves having to deal with a much more pleasant “dilemma.”
Activity and plans to renovate, expand or build new clubhouses, golf courses and other facilities has ramped up to levels we haven’t seen in close to a decade. At the same time, thanks in large part to an influx of new members who were also unnerved by the pandemic and flocked to join clubs as one of the few available safe refuges for their families, usage levels throughout the property are also at highs not seen in many years.
The new challenge for many clubs, then, is to get construction underway to maximize their future appeal (and take full advantage of current interest rates and other economies), while minimizing the disruption or annoyance factor for all those who now want to use the club—and in particular, those who have just become members and may be especially turned off by any impediments to full enjoyment of what they’ve just signed up for.
Again, this is a much nicer “problem” to have, and many managers and their staffs are embracing it as a challenge that’s a lot more fun to take on than what hit them in the face a year ago.
I recently interviewed Adam Kushner, General Manager/COO for the Berkeley Hall Club in Bluffton, S.C., for a segment of our “The Road Ahead” video series and asked him about how his club hopes to stay as fully open and appealing as possible as it starts a $5.1 million facility improvement project over the next 10 months.
“That’s actually one of the things that our team has really been getting excited about: What can we still offer to our membership during this [active] time?” Kushner said. “We’ve already started dining in our Learning Center, in a little room we call the Fazio room, where members can now have an outdoor lunch. We’ve also expedited service for people while they’re on our North Course playing golf, and we’re expanding what we’ve done at our pool and fitness center, to now have Saturday evenings with music and dining.
“Overall,” Kushner added, “we’re looking for all of the ways we can continue to offer outdoor dining [during the construction].”
It doesn’t just start, or stop, with dining-related challenges, however. Finding effective ways to still accommodate the greater demand for use of the golf course, fitness facility, pool, tennis and pickleball courts, and other spots around construction activity on your own property is also preferable to taking the approach often used in the past, of just setting up reciprocal arrangements with other clubs.
For one thing, those clubs are a lot busier now, too, and may be less inclined or prepared to take in outsiders. For another, your members themselves may be more reticent to go elsewhere, as concerns about comfort levels and safety still linger. And new members especially may not be too receptive to the idea of now having to go elsewhere, even if it is explained as a temporary situation.
Construction also adds to the always nagging issue of having ample and accessible parking, and a recent report about a solution that Dubuque (Iowa) Golf & Country Club found in that area as it starts a $3.4 million expansion project is also worth noting. The private club got the city of Dubuque to sell it over 11 acres of right-of-way adjacent to its property for half its assessed value, in return for taking on some responsibility for storm-sewer maintenance.
“These were little strips of land surrounded by country club land on both sides,” a city official said. “It’s hard to imagine we would ever use it, so it made sense to sell it.” And it made sense to ask.
Joe Barks,
Editor
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