How to Build a (Profitable!) Mom-and-Pop Golf Course

How much is being spent on golf course construction and renovation, some truly eye popping numbers out there, and it's a problem because those costs get passed down to you, the golfer. So I thought it was just time to have a conversation purely focused on that theme. What is the nitty gritty of how you actually build affordable golf? And this is a question that's not just relevant for industry people,

for architects and superintendents. This is something that every golfer should know at least a little about, because you pay green fees, you pay member dues. Ultimately you are funding

all of this in the end. And if you're empowered with some knowledge, you can start to say things like, hey, that super expensive method of green construction or bunker construction might not be necessary for my personal enjoyment of golf, and you can start to push back on some of the things that make the game more expensive right now. So my guest for this podcast is Mike Young. Mike is a golf course architect and really one of the

pioneers of modern minimalism in golf course construction. He designed the Fields golf course in Georgia in nineteen eighty six, and at that time the Fields was really different from most of the golf getting built in America. It was much more scaled down and natural, and it really predicted the direction that architects like Corn Crenshaw and Tom Doak

ended up going. Mike is now the owner of the Fields and the course is still very affordable to play, so that gives him an extra special perspective on the topic of the podcast today because Not only does he know how to build affordable golf, economical golf, but he also knows the realities that owners face after a golf

course gets built. So in addition to doing all of that designing the fields the fields, Mike has done design work at a number of other courses, mostly in the Southeast, but also in Central America, and currently he's working on a very exciting municipal project in Vidalia, Georgia. This course is called Warmouth Sands and the plan is for it

to open this year. So we'll talk a bit about that, but mainly, I just wanted to dig into some of Mike's concerns about rising costs in the golf course industry and some of the forces that he thinks are driving those costs up beyond what they should be. I also want to talk about his vision for what should be done. How is it possible in this day and age to build everyday golf courses for everyday players, or, as he puts it, mom and pop golf courses. Really excited about

this conversation. Mike is one of my favorite voices in the game, and I always get a lot out of going back and forth with him. So a word about health. And now I'm not talking about the health of the golf course industry. I'm talking about bodily personal health. Taking care of your health isn't always easy, but it should at least be simple. That's why for the last year and a half or so, I've been drinking ag one

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recommended for optimal nutrient absorption. So I just fill up my shaker with cold water, one scoop of ag one, shake it up, and I'm pretty much ready to go. Now, if I'm on the road, which I often am, if I'm traveling seeing golf courses and I can't bring my full set up with me, then I'll just bring some AG one travel packs. These are really convenient. I know exactly how many I need to bring for each trip, it's just the number of days that I'm gone. And

each one. Each travel pack is an individual serving of AG one that's super easy to mix on the go, which helps ensure that I get my daily nutrients no matter where I might be in the world. If there's one product I had to recommend to elevate your health, it's AG one and that's why we've partnered with them for so long at Frida Egg Golf. So if you want to take ownership of your health, start with AG one.

Try AG one and get a free one year supply of Vitamin D three plus K two and five free AG one travel packs with your first purchase, exclusively at drinkag one dot com slash the Frida Egg. That's drink ag one dot com slash the Frida Egg. Check it out. All right, Mike Young, Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here.

or bunkers. And I thought to myself, yes, please, let's get into that. Let's get into detail about that. So maybe we could just take this one piece at a time. Say you're building a new green on a new site. How do you do that as cheaply as possible? Can you take me through that.

thirty million rounds played last year. If you took twenty thousand rounds for those top five hundred, that's ten million rounds. They use five hundred and twenty million rounds that are played somewhere, and those are not played on courses with one hundred and fifty dollars and above green face. It's a different product. In most cases, it's not a product where people are signing the back of the check with the people that run those things, or signed in the

front of the check. They're not able to use GoF as a amenity for housing anything else. They're trying to run golf courses, and so they look for a way that allows them to make a profit, and most cases make a living because, in my opinion, most of God in this country is mom and pop. It's just that you don't it doesn't bring the attention and you don't hear of it like you do the top five hundred.

So let's just forget those top five hundred today and let's talk about the rest of the five hundred and twenty million rounds that are played. And with that, if I'm building in Georgia, let's just say, in Georgia, if I'm building a green for tiff eagle grass.

the top two inches. So we just put the sand up, floated out the way we need it and build it. And that green is much more considerably cheaper than building a USGA green. Where I've got to build a cavity, I've got to make sure all the layers are parallel. I'm going through. I'm probably at fifteen dollars a square foot now, and this way i might be at three dollars now. The thing about all that is the way it gets marketed is there's a cheap ass over there

building this stuff that way. But the thing is my guy's making a profit, the other guy might not be.

USGA green. But there were several big boys that didn't build USGA greens, and there were several that would say they did. But if you went and measured it, there might be thirty inches of sand in one puck spot and ten inches in the other. But they had that gravel on the bottom, and they preached the USGA green.

So if you're going strictly by the specifications, not the recommendation, but the specification, you have to have your layers parallel, and I think you're allowed a half inch of variation. So if you get outside at half inch of variation, did you really build a USGA green? I don't know.

land that's there. When you're in a place that shouldn't have a golf course, but some dude wants to put it there so he can have his houses. You might have to build a USGA green to make it work. If you come into a sandy site, you've got plenty of sunlight, you've got ways to move the water and get it off the green. You might can put ten twelve inches of sand down there and build a hell out of it and be and have something that works.

And again it goes back to your superintendent. You're a good superintendent that's going to grow that grass on concrete, so it's Bermuda grass not vin grass. Right.

to do. And it's pretty amazing what superintendents are able to do these days right.

It was one tenth. He says, well, hell, I know what to do on this end. But it's you know, knowing how to do it for the right price. And he knew how to do it for the right price, ground driven reels, right applications of fertilizer, how to. And that's what's funny, the really good superintendents that know how

to do it for that price. And for me, my superintendent of the year is always going to be that dude that can get that three hundred thousand dollars budget looking jam up, versus the dude that's got ten ribbons and five assistants And I don't mean anything against the dude the other dude. I'm just saying there's a hell a lot to be said for that.

that permuter grass down there? And he said, look, says you can't do what I did, said you'd be fired. And because he said, what do you mean, he said, well, I own the place. I can spray round up. You can't. And that's you know, those are the kind of things that can't. I don't blame those guys. I'm just saying that's the difference. Yeah. You know.

The other was named k is named Chris Shoemaker, and he was a superintendent who had previously been at another golf course in Michigan, and he was also the owner, the initial owner of Diamond Springs, and so he came in and the whole place was one cut, one fairway cut. And then you have the greens. There's single row irrigation, very simple bunkers, very simple green construction. And you look at that and say, well, if more golf courses were

built like that, more golf courses would be affordable. And so you're absolutely right that superintendents know what they can do to make a place affordable. It just you know, if they're in the position of owning the course, that's when they're really going to act on that knowledge, I suppose.

a few years. You might hose out your drain from the other end to make sure there's not a gopher or something in it every two or three years. But I do that. And the coolest thing I've been I've been doing it late lately, and I'm doing it in warm Mouth, is I'm side an entire bunker. I like that. I like that, And it might be we're going to see,

but so far I've had no issues. I like that, But I just think that it's it's the other thing is if you try to make your golf course indigenous to the location, you you don't have the freely age, you don't have the bunker you would find in sand

hills in Georgia where are clay based. In most cases were clay, and that that bunker's artificial at best, and so you're throwing sand in the cavity, So you just got to make sure nothing else goes in it, and you don't need to use that many bunkers on golf courses that you're that are affordable golf courses I'm trying to keep the budget.

and we can address that later. But right now, you know a lot of what's available for structuring a bunker, for making sure it drains. That that has changed.

long term. Or do you think that that's for the most part in unnecessary expenditure.

because we can afford that. But the number one thing I think to keep a bunker working is keep enough sand in it. Every problem I've seen with these bunkers is where the sand gets so shallow. If it's capillary concrete, if it's better billy, if it's no liner, it's where some dude kept raking it in a circle with a sand pro And finally you just get down to where there's nothing but a liner and you grab the liner. One day, or you hit the gravel, or you do whatever.

But if you've got a guy where he probes that sand and keeps that sand consistently at five or six inches, I think a lot of your problems go away, no matter what you've got in it. Now me as a you know, I'm a seventy one year old, grumpy, old white dude. And so much of our golf today is subsidized. And by that, I mean you'll have a guy that has the money to build a golf course that's forty million dollars golf course, and I think that's great. I

think more power to it. He doesn't have to make that money back when he's just playing with it, so he can afford to do that. And if he's charging you fifteen hundred dollars a day to play golf or something like that, that's fine. He's still subsidizing you. You're not making a profit for him at that. And so much of this golf we see at those levels. You ask yourself what happens if he gets tired of it and the next guy comes along. What if somebody had

to make a profit, how do they do it? And that's my whole thing, is you know, Kayser's really the only ones that have really figured this thing out as far as building this thing and making a numbers work. There's a lot of this these hotels and all. Often it's just to sell rooms and they're they're there. You build a golf course for them, and they don't know about the golf. They just want to it's an amenity to sell rooms, right.

a town on the coast in Georgia. I find out they're putting capillary concrete in the bunkers. They went to the show, saw the capillary concrete, and the parks and rec directions, Oh, let's do this. Didn't ask anything about it. He just had somebody to come in put the concrete in there. It's it's not a good, very good product, but not everybody can afford those things. And that's alid, isn't I don't know that I make my money back on any of that. I want to be cash flowing

each year. I don't want to be dreaming about how much I'm going to save over the next five years. Cash flows the game, it's a mom and golf in the United States is mom and pop for five hundred million rounds, and mom and pop know how to do.

are fine. Is that just the point that people have to get to where they say I'm confident that I can keep these bunkers hanging together with the construction that they have.

a lot of places, and superintendents know that. So for a lot of superintendents, in order to in order to progress and move forward and get better jobs and all the object is to get the best budget and give it the best product you can give it. I have no problem with that, no problem with anybody doing that. But when it comes to making a profit, when it comes to working for mom and pop, there's a lot of superintendents that can make pretty good money on an

incentive basis working for these small families. Knowing when to call bullshit, and that's does that. I hope that doesn't offend anybody, but it's I appreciate the guy at the two and a half million dollar budget course and the same guy to quarter million dollar budget course.

long run. So that's an interesting issue. And I mean, obviously this is also site specific. I'm sure that some sites are are you know, demand more of this kind of technology.

So would you say it's even possible at this moment to do irrigation on a budget.

it down a fairway. You can pop a saddle on wherever you need it, put the swing joints in, put the heads in. But it doesn't have a free style cycle like PVC. You don't have to have a frost line on it. It can bend, you don't have to drain it, it can expand there's so much you can do with it, and so but it's always been more expensive up until recently, and now PBC's gotten where it's more expensive than that pipe. But irrigation is a very

frustrating thing for those of us that have that. Try to build a four and a half to six million dollar golf course, and mean, I mean new right now, and you know that you can still easily do that, but there's things like this past year, pump stations were one hundred and eighty two hundred thousand dollars. I was looking for one. I couldn't wait a year. I called them pump station. I got an irrigation guy up in Wisconsin. I said, man, I need to find a good pump

station that's out there. And he said, well, you know, Blue Mound just got a new one. I've got one that's seven years old or something. Said, I think you can get it for ten thousand dollars. Okay, So we take the ten thousand dollars station, we put thirty thousand dollars into it, and it's a it's a very good pump station. Those kind of things are out there. There's there's several goth superintendents that have gotten innovative. There's one

guy in Florida who Jeff Cooors his name. I mean, I can give him that, I guess, and Jeff will go out to Arizona or wherever, and some of these places that have the jack will be changing heads and all every few years, and he'll take all that and buy that stuff. And I can call Jeff and buy a controller that's rebuilt for maybe a thousand bucks where it might be eight or nine thousand dollars new. I can say, hey, I need some heads that are this type of Toro head or this type of hunter head

or this kind of Yeah, I've got those. I just I've just rebuilt these and put new soloonoids in them, and I'll buy them for one third of what they cost me. And so somebody in one of those meanies right now saying that son of a bitch is on the air saying about you stuff. Well, for most of us does. Five hundred and twenty million rounds are played on courses that cannot afford to buy what's being offered

to them in the market today. That's no different than if nobody was offering a camera or a Honda or a Nissan, whatever you call the comparable cars in those lenses, and everybody was having to drive a Mercedes. You so many of these courses have to find another product and they can't buy that. They can't make it work. And that's what you're saying. That irrigation system. You just have to say, Hey, you know what, I'm fine with center

line irrigation. I'm fine with in and out heads. I mean, just heads that are in or full circle heads on my greens. Those I can live with that. You figure those things out and you make it work. I mean at the fields, everybody likes our firm and fast conditions. They don't understand is I hadn't we had water fairways in six years, so it's like we let we let terrain do it. So you know, we water at greens and teas and if we had the water fairways, I don't know that all the heads work. So it's it's

not that we're giving them an inferior product. It's just that that's what we do for our price range and it works, right.

right now. They can charge a lot because they're very busy. What does it take for a mom and pop golf course to be able to kind of handle its irrigation little bit more in house? What kind of skill set do you need in order to do that?

It's just it's just whether or not you have to do it or not you take I say all the time, if a guy a million dollar cost, whether it's irrigation or whatnot at a club with five hundred members, is really a two thousand dollars cost because they divide that by five hundred. If it's one owner, that's a million dollar cost. And that's that's what people don't see sometimes, so they think they're playing golf for their dews or whatnot. But they just got tossess two million dollars. They just

got assess a couple thousand bucks igation system. All of those things are either divided out by a membership or they paid for by an owner who has to turn around make a profit. And I think that the average golfer, if it's green and he likes it and the grains are good, he doesn't know what kind of irrigation system you have, and it's it's to get a little scientific on you. So many people now they like the window the water window, and a water window is basically this.

It's where if a superintendent says I can water my entire golf course in four hours, and I say, well, it takes me nine hours. Well, here's the deal. Let's say you have five hundred heads, and let's say those heads use fifty gallons a minute, and you want a water in ten minute cycle. So you say, okay, I've got a pump station over here. That's a thousand gallon pump station, and I run that at eighty percent, so

I can throw out eight hundred gallons a minute. So I divide that fifty and eight hundred, and I get what sixteen heads that I can water at one time. So I divide that sixteen in ten minute cycles. That's gonna give me six cycles every hour. So that's ninety six heads an hour. Right, So at ninety six heads an hour, if I had five hundred heads in five and a half hours, I could water the golf course.

I've got a thousand heads that take me eleven hours. Well, for most of us, it doesn't matter but if you get into some of these bigger places that you don't want the irrigation going while they're playing golf or something like that, they've got to have a bigger pump station. They've got to have the capacity to throw this thing out in four hours. We don't, and I think most mom and pumps. You look at these new pump stations.

A lot of guys out there just got one pump coming up out of the ground and they're watering the golf course. And you can go over here and go to the superintendent show and get a pumps is big time. That's a quarter million bucks somebody had buying them, But it's not the five hundred and twenty million rounds. All right.

up later this year. So the big thing that happened to Grabil recently is that they almost got absolutely nailed by a wildfire. Wildfires are pretty common in the Nebraska sand hills where Gray Bowl is located, and it was a scary situation that the fire was approaching. It was basically on the property, and the people there, including Superintendent Michael Sheeley and a couple of his employees, decided to just make a stand, decided to try to fight the fire,

and it is really an amazing story. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, so we can talk about it as a happy story, but the account of it that I got from Michael Sheeley as well as the GM of the facility, Tyler Hadden, was just super compelling and that is a big part of the most recent edition of Design Notebooks. So that's just an example of the kind of content you get in Club TFE. Club TF is so important to Friday Golf.

It really allows us to do the kind of in depth content that we love to do that we think our audience likes from us, and that's why we have this subscription there's a lot of other things that go with Club TFE. You have access to exclusive Club TFE member events, you have early access to registration for all Frida Egg golf events and things like that, ongoing discounting, the pro shop, yearly member gift, all sorts of perks

like that. So if you're interested, go to the Frida egg dot com slash membership and join us in the club. All right, So we have talked about greens, We've talked about bunkers, touched on irrigation. Are there any other big cost factors we haven't discussed yet that you think we should we should get into.

putting down tiff tough. This year at the end of the day, if I go to Scotland or somewhere to play golf, they don't know what a mono stand is. And basically a monostand is one grass. Everything else sprayed out. Americans love that monostan stuff. Well, give me like a four to nineteen permuta grass in the south and let me cut it down to a half inch. And when I cut it, I'm gonna kill half the I'm gonna cut kill most of the weeds. You'll never know the difference.

And there could be three different grasses in there, and most people are gonna go play golf and not know the difference. But we have gotten so complicated with some of this stuff that we are spending so much money on some of these grasses. And it's when I first started. We spread everything except for around the greens and the

bunker faces. Now they sot an entire golf course. You know, I was looking at sod on a project today and it was dollars and ten cents a foot installed and buy carpet for that, I mean, I buy cheap carpet.

talking about. He said, well, most products in golf, they start out at the elite clubs, and people find out about them and bring them back to their clubs, and they work their way down through the business, you know, and get down to the bottom of the clubs. He said, but these new Ultra Dwarf permuter grasses, you can lay these things on a green without doing anything. Spray them out, femigate them, put the grass no till method. You just lay it on the green that's there, and eight weeks

later you've got a new surface and you're playing. And he said that's people think that's cheap and they would never do it at their elite club. But he said, that's the way it's going to go. It's starting down here. And that turned out to be true, and it's where

so many clubs in Atlanta now are Ultra Dwarf. And one of the guys that is a very good bent Grass superintendent converted to Ultra Dwarf and he told his members said, okay, I'm only going to be now in five or six weeks, and they said, what do you mean. He said, well, I'm going to put the grass on the greens. He said, when I open them back up in five or six weeks, you're not going to hurt anything. But you're going to be putting on grass it's a quarter inch high, he said, So you can go play golf.

The greens aren't perfect, but it hasn't it hasn't hurt you, and in ten weeks they'll be ready. But but you're only going to have to quit playing for four or five weeks. And so there's just how you think about it. It's just everybody's different with that stuff.

The problem is people that just want to get in golf don't know what they're doing, and they hire a lot of people that want to jack it around and tell them they've got to have this and this and this, and they borrow the money and then they got a problem. I respect most of all the architects. There's only a couple of knuckleheads, and I have the utmost respect for those that determine to decide their career is going to be building the elite courses. That's a you have to

admire those guys. That's a hard road. You're gone, you have to commit to it at early age. You have to get out there. You can't do with your family, you can't do any of that. So we're power to them. But it's sort of like, you know, you ever get on a magazine and see who the top ten plastic surgeons in the world are. When you open up page and it says, here's the top ten plastic surgeons. I think sometimes we get to where the goth architecture worlds

that way. I think there's all over the country. I think there's some pretty good architects that people don't know about. But the average country club member only knows what he's been fed. And so he walks in and he says, I got to have this or I got to have that. He's not even going to consider talking to anyone that's not here. And when he does that, it's not a question of can the other guy build that or something. It's a question of, here's what my budget's going to be.

I remember not that long ago when guys like Nicholas and Fasia were like, well, look I don't build anything for less than this, I need this much budget. That's fine, they can get that, but it doesn't mean that you can't build a product that works. And so it's a totally different outlook from people when they're dealing with the average architect in America versus the ten guys that everybody

knows about, or the five guys everybody knows about. It is that if one of the grains has got too much slope on it they can't put then you're no good and they never want to use you again. If I'm one of the top dudes, then it's like, hey, will you come back and fix this? And it's two different things, so you got to be careful in those ways. The problem is so many people just don't want to build the affordable course. They don't know. It's not the

architects that don't want to build it. I mean, it's like it's it's it's that these clubs and all are being bsd into spending money that just doesn't need to be spent. And you see it every day. And I've had to learn the hard way just to get it out of my mind and let don't let it worry me. I want to I want to go play golf or something. I'm not going to worry about it anymorening. But it's you see it and you say, how did you come up with that? And it's and and then you realize, hey,

I got sold. And that's that's what's happening, is is the industry ends up it it knows where it can sell itself.

the edges. They want to go so many clubs, the money they spend on the edges, you know, fairway and flower beds, all that stuff. And these younger guys they understand that and they get it and they would rather

go out. They're not after perfect conditions. And that's a battle that nobody's gonna win, because we're gonna continue, and we're gonna continue, and we're gonna take it, and they're gonna roll the ball back, and some clown's gonna come along and cut his fairways down to three sixteenth of then and everything they roll back is going to roll right back out there. So I think I think it's

an age thing. I think that group appreciates golf in a different way than my age appreciated GoF For so many of my buddies, it was a had to be at the club thing, wanted to They married these Stepford wife type ladies that want to be at the club. It was wan it was a social thing. These guys, it's social, but they actually like playing golf. I don't think a lot of the guys my age played really loved the sport that much. You had some, but you had a lot of them that felt they needed to

do it for business. Your group doesn't seem to care.

life life anymore. No, it used to be. It used to be the center of a certain social class's social life, and it used to be extremely important for certain kinds of businesses. I don't think it's that way anymore. And so the people who get into golf are into it because they want to play golf. They're they're into the game.

of those places is low. And so I know that, you know, you can't possibly have the definitive answer to this question, since it's an unanswerable question, But how do we get to a place where the golf course industry is supplying more of those experiences for the people who seem to want them.

for golf courses in certain regions. You don't know who they are, but just go build them and don't You've got to have a personality where when the dude comes in and tells everybody you don't know what you're doing because you didn't do it this way or that way. You've got to just be able to roll with it. Because if your owners are happy and they understand why you did things a certain way, and they're they're making money, then you're fine. And I think a lot of young

guys haven't gotten to that point. You know, they haven't figured that out yet, but I think they will. You know, you've got to be able to call bullshit. It's almost like an underground market. I mean, the mom and pop golf course just doesn't tell everybody how they do it. Once you get in that market, you can do okay in that market. And uh, those guys are they can they know how to call bullshit and and your age group is figuring that out well.

with that course? And we looked at it and played with it for a month or two, and I said, Mayor, I said, look, by the time you get through with all this, you'd be much better off to go over to the airport where you've got six hundred acres of basically sandland and build your own golf course. He said, that's what I want to hear. That's what I want

to do. And then he came to tell me that they had been watching o'hoopie and that their fuel at the airport had just jumped because all the G four's and the Challenger six fiftieses everything that were coming in there. And you know, you go over to the airport afternoon, you got kid rock any logging sitting there, Eli and Peyton, all these guys sitting there waiting on their planes.

So the Mayor's like, you know what, this is an economic engine, and he says I want to build this golf course as an economic engine from this area because I never understood what the sand could do to golf or what sand was to golf, and I had explained that to it and the demand that sold the land for a hoop. He had sold all of his onion farms to Bill Gates family farms. Bill Gates wanted the water. He wanted to aquifer this down under there, and he was big and Vadia and they had helped him out.

But anyway, they were raised all the money and we started building a golf course. And we started to clear over a year ago. And then the highway US Highway won was being built to Miami and there was a bypass and some of the land that was being donated for the course was on the highway and on and the highway bid didn't didn't let when they think it

thought it would, so everything got postponed. We had to adjust some of the holes out and go to the wetland committee, go to so we went through everything and then we cleared and grub it. Grubbed it last month and we started shaping a month ago. So we're we're building it again now and it's a it'll be. It won't be a long CA course. It'll be probably sixty seven sixty six sixty seven hundred. I'm going to keep less than fifteen bunkers on it, and it'll be a

good municipal golf course. It's you know, the new thing is to get into the simulators on the range and get more of a fire pit hang out place where people can come out and do the top golf experience in the evenings, that kind of stuff. So we're doing that at the clubhouse. They've they've got a lot of

that going. But it's it's it's interesting what what one guy coming in and building a course that nobody would ever expect to be built there could do as far as growing golf in that area and how people have picked up on it and are behind it, and that town now said, you know, they understand they've got sand there and so that that's what that's what we've got and that's what we're doing.

So we're still playing with that. The committee is very open to that. It's it's a state of the art irrigation system that we've got at the right price. We bit it out and got everything at the right price, and it'll it'll be it'll be me and bucks, and that's that's pretty good. Today. We're gonna mow it at

one height to cut. We'll mow it with the gang Wars it's it's interesting to interview superintendents and and you know you've got one that gets it when he's been at a prominent club and you're like, okay, dude, what the hell are you doing here? And he's like, well, I grew up twenty miles from here, I've been there, I've seen that I know how to do what you're talking about doing. I'm like, you know what you're giving up. I mean, you're you're on the climb. Do you want

to come back and do this? And those are the kind of guys. You find your guy like that that can actually be the superintendent and run the place, be over the golf pro and the whole deal, and you you're on your way. And so I hope we've found on one but just a country public golf course that the numbers will be watched and it's got a lot of people behind it.