Page 49 - BusinessWest Sept. 29, 2021
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ther. He said that, despite the rain, which has taken five whole days from the calendar, by his count, and parts of countless others, the club is doing nearly as well as it did last year, and much better than the years immediately preceding the pandemic.
“We didn’t reach 2020 numbers, but we surpassed all our 2019 numbers,” he noted. “And we destroyed 2018 numbers — absolutely clobbered them.”
Like Fontaine and Piecuch, Altobello said the surge the game wit- nessed in 2020 appears to have staying power, manifesting itself in everything from those impressive numbers of rounds to a waiting list for membership, something this club, and most area clubs, haven’t seen in quite a while.
“We’re back to an initiation fee at the club, for the first time in 15 years or more,” he noted. “Every category is filled up. We’re still taking some social memberships and things like that, but everything else is full; we have 20 people on a waiting list trying to get in for 2022.”
The hope, of course, is that the rain subsides for the last few months of this year and courses continue to build momentum for 2022. But as everyone has seen this past summer, forecasting can be difficult.
Clouding the Issue
The 8th hole at Greenfield is a fairly short par 5, while the 9th is
a stout par 4 of nearly 400 yards. There were times this year, though, when the former was a par 4 and the latter a par 3, because portions of those fairways were just too wet for play and adjustments had to be made, said Piecuch, who also has 30 years of experience under his belt and can say with hesitation that he’s never seen this much rain.
“We’ve had to flop some holes around and take some other steps,” he said, adding that there has been some shuffling of the schedule as well, especially with league play,
“When we were
open, it lived up to
the expectations
we had at the start
which has seen a number of cancellations.
There have been adjustments like this at many
area clubs over the course of the year, with the relentless rains taking their toll on courses that were soft most all of the time and waterlogged a good deal of the time.
At many courses, carts were not permitted on some days, and were only permitted on the cart paths on many others. Some holes were simply
   of the year.”
unplayable, and others had to be shortened. And
  those were some of the minor steps to be taken. Indeed, following some of the many heavy downpours, especially
those accompanying Hurricane Ida just before Labor Day weekend, courses had to close and dry out.
Fontaine, like others in the business, has kept careful count of the days, and rounds, lost to the weather. “It rained parts of 19 days in July, enough for us to lose revenue each one,” he said, adding that there were other days when it didn’t rain but the course was closed, at least part of the day, because it wasn’t playable.
“There was standing water on holes where we don’t have cart paths, or the cart paths were impassable, or trees came down,” he told BusinessWest, adding that, overall, the couse has held up well through it all.
Often, the rain came with heavy winds. Altobello said a rare microburst took down 17 trees on the Springfield Country Club prop- erty in late August.
The rain became more poignant, and even more of a story, because, as noted, this was supposed to be a big year for area cours- es, a time to build on the momentum gained last season, when, because almost everything done indoors was closed, golf saw a resurgence. It wasn’t like 1997, when Tiger Woods was fueling almost unprecedented interest in the game and new courses — like the Ledges — were conceptualized and built to capitalize on that surge.
But it was certainly, well ... greener times for courses in a region that had seen some tracks close — Southwick Country Club and Hickory Ridge in Amherst, for example — and many private courses struggle to find members and actively market themselves (something rarely seen in years past) in search of more.
And while it would have been much better in a normal weather year, 2021 was decent in many respects. Those we talked with said it didn’t rain much on weekends, their most important days, and the clubs were able to salvage at least part of the most of the days when it did rain.
“On most all days, we were able to salvage half a day — play in the morning, get rained out in
Golf
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  SPORTS & LEISURE
SEPTEMBER 29, 2021 49
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