This month’s PGA Magazine cover story is all about the importance of measuring and benchmarking the performance of your facility and your own metrics (see page 86 for the full story). Another important area of a golf facility’s performance is pace of play, and using today’s improved technology to track and improve it – and compare it to similar facilities –has a number of positive effects.
Whether you’re hitting the midway point of your season or things have just teed off and you’re looking at the season ahead, it’s always worthwhile to take stock to understand how your facility’s performance compares with similar operations.
Companies like Tagmarshal, FairwayIQ and E-Z-GO are helping PGA of America Golf Professionals effectively track round time, manage bottlenecks and report on the results to boards and owners.
At Wisconsin’s Erin Hills, PGA of America Head Golf Professional Jim Lombardo places a premium on early interventions. By analyzing years’ worth of Tagmarshal data, his staff can identify which groups are potential delayers even before they tee off. Attention is focused on monitoring groups over the first five holes to get ahead of pace before it can mushroom into challenges.
“We communicate our pace of play guidelines to all groups before they tee off,” Lombardo says, “so nobody is surprised when interactions take place.” If necessary, rangers also communicate with caddies about a group’s pace of play using hand signals, so caddies can attempt to get the group back into position quickly without a ranger's intervention.
It’s not only about asking groups to speed up, stresses Lombardo. “Not all interactions are pace warnings and ‘thumbs up’ interactions to groups on pace or ahead are just as important as those where pace of play corrections are needed, as well as dropping back to speak to the groups behind, so they know we are actively working to improve pace,” he says.
Lake Shawnee Golf Course in Topeka, Kansas, also relies on clear communication and an early intervention system to keep the field moving. The facility uses FairwayIQ, which alerts players of their pace on their golf car screens.
“Pace of play was a common complaint, with rounds averaging about 4:20. Since installing Fairway IQ on our golf cars, we now average about 3:50 per round with almost no complaints and no issues that staff have to deal with on a daily basis,” says Patrick Shaw, the PGA of America Head Professional at Lake Shawnee. “This has improved both the player experience and our starter/marshals working each day by eliminating the need to talk to groups falling behind on pace, which lets our starts focus on greeting players on the first tee.”
Red Run Golf Club in Royal Oak, Michigan, is also seeing strong results from using E-Z-GO’s Pace Technology. PGA of America Assistant Professional Scott Coleman helps run outside operations at the club, and is able to easily show results to his board.
“We take all our pace of play printouts to our golf committee meetings, and we’ve been able to get our average time down to 3:55 from our rated time of 4:20,” Coleman says. “We can monitor each golf car and watch when one falls behind, and then we can send them a message to help them catch up without sending someone out on the course. It’s saved us a ton of time, and that’s very helpful.”
For more case studies of how PGA of America Golf Professionals are measuring and benchmarking pace of play, see an expanded version of this story on PGAmagazine.com.
