Golfdom Report: 21 at last

Graph: Golfdom Staff

Attracting family play

More than 90 percent of our survey respondents said rounds were up this year. This increased interest in demand for tee times is good for the game of golf, but with this increase came operational challenges.

A challenge many courses had to navigate at the beginning of the pandemic was a shift to single-rider carts. This meant extra cart traffic on the course and the necessity to sanitize carts for the next tee time. Such was the case at The Cliffs at Keowee Falls in Salem, S.C.

“Turning those carts around was a big deal because we just didn’t have any tee times available,” says Jim Evans, director of agronomy for The Cliffs. “It was mainly due to golf cart availability. We tripled our rounds this year. Honestly, it was very hard to keep up.”

The Cliffs — which features seven different courses on the resort — implemented a few innovative ideas. The first was to set a new forward orange tee, which Evans says cuts the challenging Keowee Falls course in half.

“It’s a Nicklaus design, and it is tough,” he says. “We wanted to make it easier for everybody to play. We especially wanted to bring in families, kids, folks that have never played before.”

The team at The Cliffs has also implemented a daily tee setup program to mix up the look of the tees on an almost daily basis.

Graph: Golfdom Staff

“You may play the blues one day, and the next day it’s totally different on the blues,” he says. “We’ve thought hard on how to make the game interesting and unique every single day.”

— C.H.

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