When it comes to strategies to improve pace of play and minimize long rounds of golf, Steve Southard wrote the book.
Literally.
Two of them, in fact.
Southard, the golf operations manager for the city of Loveland, is not only a local expert regarding pace-of-play issues, but a national one. He teaches a seminar on the subject each year at the national Golf Industry Show. Last week, he conducted a USGA webcast for a group in Montana. And next week he’ll be in Oregon to teach a USGA seminar that’s attended by golf professionals, general managers, course owners and superintendents.
And, of course, there are those books: Mastering Pace of Play While Maximizing Revenue (2010) and Golf: The Complete Guide to Mastering Pace of Play (2013).
Suffice it to say that Southard is a man on a pace-of-play mission.
“Here’s what’s funny: This is so important to our customers, but somehow our industry has dropped the ball on this topic,” Southard said by phone on Monday.
But if Southard has anything to do about it — and he undoubtedly will — that will change.
Since moving to Colorado about eight years ago — and becoming the golf operations manager four years ago — Southard has implemented what he preaches at Loveland’s three golf courses, most notably Mariana Butte and the Olde Course at Loveland.
The result, he said, are midday weekend rounds that average 40 minutes less than they did prior to his tenure, with the norm during those busy times now being about 4 hours, 35 minutes at Mariana Butte and 4:20 at the Olde Course.
Where the Loveland courses used to issue 8-12 rain checks each weekend to people upset with long rounds and slow play, they now issue a very small percentage of that number.
“It used to be really bad. It was embarrassing to drive around the course on the weekend,” said Southard, who cut his teeth as a course superintendent.
How important is this issue to Southard? He estimates he spends 400-500 hours a year working on it, mostly on a voluntary basis. He has seen a dearth of effective strategic information on the topic — be it books, manuals or sharing of best practices — so he’s doing what he can to fill some of the void.
Though Southard doesn’t think USGA efforts such as “Tee It Forward” and “While We’re Young” get to the crux of the issue, he at least credits the association for being one of the first major golf organizations to truly champion a cause which addresses an issue that so aggravates many golfers. (Note: The PGA of America joined with the USGA to launch “Tee It Forward.”)
Southard believes current efforts to speed up the flow of play focus far too little on course operations.
“There’s a lot of things course (management) can control, but one thing we can’t control very well is the golfer,” he said.
For instance, one thing Southard calls “the lowest hanging fruit” in reducing round times is eliminating a widely held practice of having a beverage cart move around the course against the direction of play, stopping groups as it goes. Far less disruptive, he said, is having a parked beverage cart at key junctures of the front and back nine — and never on a par-3.
“We’re the knuckleheads if we can’t see how (beverage carts working backward through the course) affects the flow of play,” said Southard, who estimates that change alone can reduce round times on busy days by 20 minutes.
A key in effectively managing the flow of players around a course is to identify the two or three bottlenecks that cause backups and effectively deal with them, Southard indicated. Par-5s reachable in two or long par-3s often present problems in that regard.
“Pace of play boils down to how long it takes people to leave a hole, on average,” Southard said.
Many of the things that bottleneck play can be controlled from a golf operations standpoint — for instance, not having that beverage cart hanging out on a par-3, a cart-path-only policy on a given hole, a problematic bunker or other hazard on a hole, even a poorly situated restroom or water jug, plus more obvious things like hole location and length. So by making some adjustments, those average hole exit times can be reduced. And saving 30 seconds per group on a given hole can make the difference between continuous flow and constant logjams, even with tee-time intervals from 8-9 minutes.
Besides the beverage cart operations, Southard said another key to reducing round times during busy periods is effectively customizing the tee-time set-up. In other words, don’t have the same tee-time intervals all day or even weekdays vs. weekends.
In the morning, when play is moving faster, the tee times can be tighter. And in the afternoon, when play slows down, spread out the intervals. At Mariana Butte, for instance, Southard said the course will sometimes alternate between seven- and eight-minute tee times in the morning, then lengthen the interval to nine minutes in the middle of the day.
“The industry (generally speaking) does the opposite,” he said. “They’ll have starter times (a tee time purposely unused) in the morning when people are playing faster, then they’ll stop having starter times at 11 or so. So they’ll have fewer (filled) tee times when people are playing faster and more (filled) tee times when people are playing slower.
“Every course in America would be better off (customizing tee-time intervals on busy days). But it’s hard to change the way things have always been done.”
But golfers also need to be trained on having reasonable expectations regarding pace of play, perhaps by an organization such as the USGA, Southard said. For instance, he noted that in a survey Loveland conducted last year, 62 percent of respondents said they should never have to wait on a shot if the pace of play is pretty good.
But, as Southard points out, if golfers are riding in a cart at peak play times, “you’re going to wait (to hit shots into greens). The second part of a hole takes longer to play than the first. That you have to wait in the fairway doesn’t (necessarily) mean slow play. There’s an amount of wait time that’s acceptable.
“There’s a perception that any waiting is slow play. A lot of golfers are just unrealistic about pace of play.”
And, of course, what might be a good pace of play in the middle of a busy day wouldn’t be acceptable in the early morning. So it isn’t realistic — or make much sense — for a course to pin itself down to a certain expectation for length of rounds regardless of the time of day.
Southard became passionate about pace-of-play matters as a general manager and part-owner of a course in Michigan.
“Where I’m from, the season is very short, and you sweat it out in the winters when there’s no customers,” he said. “So you want to maximize the number of people on the course (during the playing season). That means you need to improve the flow of golfers (on the course). That’s kind of a win-win.”
