Golf operators are ready to tee it up now
Just waiting for the OK from Ford
Are you a golfer? Have you been staring out the window at your greening lawn like a child on Christmas night looking longingly for Santa? Need some good news in these days of doom and gloom? You’ve come to the right place. When Premier Doug Ford announced last week that COVID-19-stalled golf courses could begin getting ready to open, some took that to mean crews could start cutting the grass, shaving the greens and essentially coming out of hibernation as if courses had been left fallow since last fall. Give them a few weeks and they’d be up and running. The truth is, you won’t be waiting that long.
“If we were told today we could open at 4 o’clock, we’re ready to go,” says Copetown Woods director of guest experience Barry Forth.
“We’re pretty much there,” says Flamborough Hills Golf and Country Club director of golf Nigel Bowerman.
Even though courses haven’t been able to have the usual contingent of greenskeepers working, none have left things alone waiting for the go-ahead. If you’d done that and just started cutting the grass today, you’d burn it off and kill the course.
Which is not where things are now. It’s going to drive golfers nuts to hear this but many course managers say their track looks as good today as it ever has. A mild winter with no deep freezes and no ice storms made things ideal for spring. Even a spring that hasn’t been exactly warm. Bowerman says Flamborough Hills is “perfect.” Forth says Copetown Woods is as good as it’s been. The city’s manager of sport services says Hamilton’s two municipal courses look really nice.
“Without this pandemic, it would’ve been a great time to open,” Steve Sevor says. “We would’ve likely opened the earliest we had in years.”
That’s with minimal staff maintaining Chedoke and King’s Forest until now. So the cue from the premier to get started preparing is really a bit of a misnomer. It’s less an OK to start than a thumbs up to begin the fine-tuning. As in, bringing in more staff, working on the bunkers and launching into other finishing touches.
That doesn’t mean there’s nothing still to do. When they do open to players, there will be some adjustments from what’s been the norm. Some of those remain unclear at this point, meaning it could take a little while to get things fully ready.
Provinces where courses have been allowed to open have imposed rules such as sanitizing carts, possibly having devices in place that block balls from falling to the bottom of a cup so flag sticks don’t have to be touched, providing food delivery to golfers on the course and other distancing measures.
Forth says he expects there will be demands for longer gaps between tee times so he’s already preparing to extend the usual eight-minute window to 12 or 15 to keep people further apart.
Most managers here have been watching closely what’s been happening elsewhere that’s allowed courses to open and are ready to mimic those rules with little delay.
The province tells them they can open and they can have people on the tee within hours or maybe days, they’re saying.
“We’ve been working on plans to open as quickly as we can,” Sevor says of the city courses.
It all sounds very positive. But there is one challenge golfers may face when everything gets going: Getting a tee time.
People are feeling cooped up and want to get outside. Folks who’ve been waiting all winter to hit balls have a giant itch to scratch.
Forth says he expects to be swamped with callers the second the ban is lifted.
“It’s hard to guess,” he says, “but I think we will be.”