Page 23 - BusinessWest April 27, 2020

Communicate:
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to your website or Facebook. They can call or email you. Even if you’re not open, it’s a way to stay in front of people and be part of the fabric of the business community.
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OW. From your listing, they can move on
Antillio Cardaropoli, owner of Twin Hills Country Club in Longmeadow, says uncertainty about when the ban will be lifted makes it extremely difficult to plan.
industry will reach a new, unprecedented level of pain.
“From this point on, every week is critical to lose,” said Perez,
noting that courses in this part of the country make more than 75% of their revenue between mid-April and mid-September. “This is revenue you just can’t make up.”
No Course of Action
It’s called ‘Good Friday, Bad Golf.’ It’s an annual event at East Mountain, a start-of-the-season gathering staged when most peo- ple have the day off from work and they’re eager to take the sticks out of the basement.
“You can’t give anyone any answers because no one knows what’s going to happen. The governor says it may be May 4. What
if it isn’t? No one knows.”
“It’s a huge golf outing — 140 players — and prime-rib dinner, the whole nine yards; when you add everything up, the golf, the bar, the snack bar, the dinner ... it’s a huge day,” said Perez, noting that it obviously wasn’t a big day this year. “That’s gone; that’s been wiped out, and I can’t make it up.”
The question on everyone’s mind, and the question that can’t be answered, is how much more will be wiped out during the 2020 season?
Indeed, golf, like many other businesses, is
in a state of limbo, or suspended animation. Courses can be maintained — that work has been deemed essential — but no one can play on them. Some still try, but such covert activities have drawn the ire of elected officials, if not the course owners themselves; Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno’s very public threat to barricade the city’s two municipal golf courses to keep people off them made headlines across the state.
For those managing courses, they can deal with the present, and they are (more on that in a moment), but, as noted, they can’t plan for the future because they have no idea what it looks like.
Overall, it’s not a good place to be.
“You can’t give anyone any answers because no one knows what’s going to happen,” Cararopoli said. “The governor says it may be May 4. What if it isn’t? No one knows.”
Elaborating, he said the many question marks about the future are wreaking havoc on the banquet side of the ledger. “We’ve lost so many events already — weddings, bar mitzvahs, proms, show- ers, birthdays,” he noted. “And no one can rebook because they don’t know what’s going to
transpire over the next few
months.” Continued on page 28
Golf
BusinessWest COVID-19 SPECIAL COVERAGE APRIL 27, 2020 23
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