Well it’s been all right, golfing around this year
Well it’s been all right, we’ve had nothing to fear
Well it’s been all right, playing with different rules
Well it’s been all right, our league has helped us refuel
At the end of 2019 we wrote an article about the start of a new decade, 2020, little did we know what this decade would bring. We ended the article with the following: “So here’s to another decade and more changes I am sure….lifetime learning is what it is and we love the challenge.”
Since our inception in 1997 Golfaround Inc has survived numerous challenges: extreme smoke, so bad we couldn’t see the houses on the hill at Blue Devil; the flood of 2013 that seriously affected many of the golf courses; a major financial loss that almost brought Golfaround Inc to the end of the road; as well as a changing golf industry and increased competition. Never did we anticipate the challenge of a pandemic to deal with which changed the face of golf for us this season.
March is usually the starting point for us to begin our indoor lessons and to get excited about Spring Training in Palm Springs but by mid March we were in lock down as the WHO declared the rapidly spreading Coronavirus a pandemic. We cancelled the indoor programs, Palm Springs and Nashville and we put on our thinking caps to try to determine what we needed to do. At first we thought of just moving things to June but that soon became a pipe dream as things went from bad to worse. Then as the push for golf courses to open started we considered offering league play to those who had deferred their fees to 2021. The problem was, though, that we were not sure if the golf courses would be able to offer us block bookings as they had in the past.
After a downturn over the last few years golf was back in a big way, there was nothing else to do and the golf courses were packed from dawn to dusk which was great for them but we did not know if it would be good for us. The golf industry came through for us in a big way and we decided to offer you the opportunity for some normalacy and the chance to play some golf, at a distance of course. Thanks to Lyn in Edmonton, who also offered to provide this opportunity gratis, we got to enjoy the great outdoors, with a few differences for sure.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and the coronavirus pandemic challenged golf course operators to finding ways to keep golf courses open and as safe as possible. One place that creativity has happened is at the cup, where flagsticks and cups themselves are seen as potential vectors for the virus. As soon as the pandemic started threatening courses with closure, superintendents sprung into action, raising, inverting and stuffing cups with things like sawed off pool noodles to make a holed ball easy to grab without golfers’ fingers touching anything else. Many courses have a touchless gizmo that you lift with your putter enabling any golfer to remove a ball from a cup by touching their putter to the hook and gently lifting upward. We asked our members to rate these gizmos and from the feedback we got we think the noodle was the best, although some of the touchless ball retrievers were pretty good.
We have really appreciated those of you who have made us aware of your appreciation and we are grateful that we were able to help you get out there and not go stir crazy being stuck at home. We also very much enjoyed seeing familiar faces and meeting new members. We played more golf than in a normal season as many of you did. Most of all, though, we are so very grateful that the golf courses supported us. We are very aware that tee times have been at a premium and golf is back to being the thing to do, due I am sure, that it is one of the very few sports to do in these times.
Well it’s all right, that the end of our season is here
Well it’s all right, we can now look forward to next year