[Follow the links to Part 1 of "A New Decade of Long Island Golf," which covered the main themes of the 2010s and what to expect in the 2020s, and Part 2 on developing local players as time runs low and millennials plan to leave Long Island.]
When followers of local golf scroll over Long Island courses on Instagram, whether it's a snap of a distant green in front of a classic clubhouse, or a stylized, music-backed clip of an early-morning drive up the entrance road, there's a good chance it's from @LongIslandGolfLinks. Patrick Prague, the 26-year-old behind the Instagram handle, showcases nothing but Long Island golf courses with personal photos and videos of layouts ranging from $7 walk-ups like the Cedar Beach Pitch & Putt to top-tier private clubs like The Creek and Friar's Head. For those interested in content beyond the visuals, Prague typically provides brief design descriptions and historical details. Every post connects him with more and more local golfers, and his combination of photography, action shots, videos and background info has attracted a strong following since Prague launched the account in summer 2018.
"Most people just love seeing different Long Island courses on display and shown off to the public," Prague says. "It gives outsiders an inside look at some of the awesome courses you can find on the Island."
It's also led to meet-ups on area courses with other Instagram posters who, like Prague, record their golf travels on and occasionally off the Island. Some have played the social-media game well enough to promote and sell their own merchandise. There's talk, Prague says, of putting together an outing at a local course with others in the online community.
"If golf courses took time to make their social media relevant and engaging then I think it could lead to more people playing," Prague says. "On the flip side, if the social media isn't well run or unappealing, it's a negative."
COURSES REMAIN QUIET AS MARKETING EVOLVES...
Prague and others who've taken to online social platforms represent a modern wave of golf media, joining some of the more traditional and established resources to offer players a well-rounded view of the local golf landscape. On in-season weekends you can peruse courses on Instagram while tuned in to Ann Liguori or Anthony Scorcia, whose longtime Sports Innerview and Scorcia On Par radio shows often feature figures of local golf. Before leaving Newsday last fall after 36 years with the paper, Mark Herrmann covered public courses and the people who run them in his popular Golf Beat column. Metropolitan Golf Association's The Met Golfer, which recently profiled The Golf Club at Middle Bay, devotes much of its space to clubs and courses in the region.
But it's the courses themselves that struggle to effectively get word out about where Long Island golfers can play and what those destinations offer. With a couple of exceptions, Long Island's public golf courses have been slow or uninterested in finding ways to promote themselves to the local golfing population, even in an era where, as Prague has shown, appealing content and the followers that come with it -- at least some of them future course customers, most likely -- can be just quick clicks and scrolls away.
Looking back, it took much of the last decade for area courses to simply update or modernize their websites. Only in recent seasons have a handful of courses started utilizing Facebook to communicate pertinent information like aeration dates and rate specials, offer real-time updates on weather delays and closures, or highlight junior golf and instructional programs. Others use Facebook to instead promote their more lucrative wedding and catering businesses. In total, of the 50-plus public golf facilities on the Island, less than half are represented by an active, golf-focused Facebook page. Barely a dozen feature active Instagram accounts.
On Twitter, the casual golfer has a unique forum to freely interact with golf designers, architects, superintendents, historians, media and professionals. Few local courses join them. Players of all types, skill sets and levels of renown chronicle their rounds and travels on Instagram. Both platforms offer unprecedented insight and visuals into public, private and professional golf, on the course and behind the scenes. Golf content is everywhere, and there are modern-day conversations happening around the clock that many Long Island golf courses are simply not part of. The silence is difficult to understand.
"Honestly, I've wondered about [marketing] for years. My only guess is that most public golf courses here are owned by older people who don't get it," says one former general manager. "The majority of owners have the mindset that there are only so many options and golfers will come regardless."
A few courses have indeed taken advantage of social media -- typically Facebook -- to promote some of their unique offerings. At Sunken Meadow, head pro Judy Alvarez initiated a women's boot camp and a "Chicks, Chip & Sip" series that pairs wine and cocktails with instruction. ("All the sessions sold out," Alvarez says.) Leagues have grown during her two years at the Kings Park muni. Notice is sent out on the Sunken Meadow Facebook page and in monthly e-mail newsletters.
Alvarez says the plan for the 2020 season is to bolster the park's social-media presence, with focus on Instagram, on top of her efforts to bring more women and veterans into the sport.
In addition to their annual course improvements, the owners of Sandy Pond in Riverhead promoted and staged events like glow-in-the-dark night golf during recent summers. Bethpage, of course, underwent a full digital rebrand in 2018. The park's social media now focus almost entirely on its junior golf academy.
Island's End has used Facebook and Instagram to publicize its semi-private membership tier for young adults under 40 -- a welcome attempt to attract millennial golfers. (Only Island's End and The Vineyards openly advertise a young-adult-focused membership option.) And courses like Cherry Creek and Swan Lake -- the latter of which recently posted a small collection of rare photos of the course's 1979 opening (right) -- have made attempts to increase engagement with followers so far this offseason.
But the majority of local courses sit out the social-media game, or marketing in general.
John Glozek, Jr., longtime publisher of Hicksville-based Golfing Magazine, thinks courses have been slow to promote themselves because, historically, there was no need. When the magazine debuted 30 years ago, golf courses were full. "They didn't have to do a thing and waits for a tee time were insane," Glozek says. "When things started going bad [after the economy tanked in 2008], the courses weren't generating enough to promote or market themselves. So they didn't."
Kristen Jarnagin is currently planning a September trip to the Ryder Cup in Wisconsin to promote the 2024 tournament, which will be held here at Bethpage Black. One thing the president and CEO of Discover Long Island is not doing is fielding calls from local golf courses looking for exposure that the region's official tourism promotion agency might be able to provide.
"We hear from breweries, wineries, aquaculture and agriculture all the time," Jarnagin says. "As soon as we hear from golf courses, we'd certainly be happy to work with them. There's definitely a void there we'd be happy to fill."
...AND NEW AUDIENCES EMERGE
Before Sweetens Cove in Tennessee became one of last decade's biggest public-golf success stories, it was simply a newly redesigned, rebranded nine-hole course struggling to find its footing. The course launched Twitter and Instagram pages, and by shining a spotlight on itself and its combination of modern, innovative design and fresh perspective on public golf, it began to draw wandering eyes.
"The golf course really blew up on social media," co-designer Rob Collins told Sports Illustrated, which profiled Sweetens in November. The SI piece highlights a few Sweetens Cove visitors who traveled across multiple state lines after hearing about the course on a podcast and getting swept up in the hype on Twitter and golf websites.
"Sweetens Cove is also attracting young golfers when overall participation is down 20% since 2006," the SI profile reads. "I credit millennials with saving the golf course," Collins told SI.
Sweetens and other modernized publics have also succeeded by tapping into another key golf demographic. Followers of golf architecture and history have slowly carried discussions of long-lost golf grounds and debates about course setup and design attribution into the mainstream in recent years.
Look no further than last year's PGA Championship at Bethpage. During its coverage leading up to the tourney, Golf Channel aired a feature in which Connor Lewis of the Society of Golf Historians and golf architect Jim Urbina walked the Lido Beach dunes to navigate the long-lost routing of the original Lido Club. Computer renderings of the century-old Lido holes were provided by Peter Flory, a Michigan-based golfer who's published his work -- a hobby totaling hundreds of hours on Lido alone -- on the Golf Club Atlas discussion forums where current designers, historians and others in the industry admire and pick through the ultra-fine details.
Just a few weeks later, Long Island's only new course of the 2010s, a little, largely unknown pitch-and-putt traversing the dunes just next door at Nickerson Beach, was featured by The Fried Egg -- a prominent architecture and design website -- as a symbol of all that's right about entry-level golf in the 21st century.
Nickerson Dunes opened in 2015 with zero fanfare -- it was seemingly announced into existence by a Nassau County press release. Despite its tiny stature and anonymous identity, that bump from The Fried Egg generated some buzz, the kind that, although small, eludes most of its local golf counterparts.
"I have friends upstate who told me they plan to take a trip down to play Bethpage and Nickerson Dunes," says Matt Krantweiss, 38, who grew up close by in Valley Stream. "I asked why they'd travel here to play a pitch-and-putt. They said they saw Nickerson on Twitter and that it looks really cool."
Krantweiss is baffled that so few local courses show off their signature holes, give players looks at different approach shots, or offer insider tips on where to aim a blind tee shot or where to miss on a tough par-3.
"I'm not going to play a course because they posted an Arnold Palmer quote or a blooper video," Krantweiss says. "But I'll definitely be interested if they break down an old Tillinghast or Emmet hole that I can play, or show me the new bunkers or remodeled greens they're building. If any course focused its efforts on material like that, it would be heads and shoulders above the rest. But it's as if they don't want the exposure."
Mark Fedeli, a frequent Long Island golfer who works in marketing, also finds himself "profoundly conflicted" when it comes to local courses.
"There are a lot of courses that seem like they could benefit from a change in philosophy, that lack identity or don't seem terribly interested in evolving," Fedeli says.
Of one Long Island course with a particularly unique design and background, as far as marketing and visibility, "It might as well not exist," Fedeli says. "Maybe the owners are perfectly content. Maybe they don't care about promoting their story. If they're fine with that, that stinks."
"It's hard to survey the entire landscape and not feel like there's a lot of wasted potential," he says.
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Barring any obstacles, Topgolf will soon arrive in Suffolk County, and a case can be made that the still-unbuilt Long Island link in the driving range and leisure chain -- currently boasting 60+ locations and more than 250,000 Instagram followers -- already has more hype than many established local courses. Will the new, young player with an interest in taking up golf as a consistent activity spend his or her free time at a golf course they've never heard of and never heard from, or will they instead head for the place that keeps showing up on their Twitter and Instagram feeds, with food, beer and celebrities swatting drives?
And if Topgolf is the choice, who will convert those players, if anyone, into green-fee-paying golfers?
Part 4 of "A New Decade of Long Island Golf," which will cover the growth and focus on junior golf, will run later this spring.
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