Golf on Long Island

A New Decade of Long Island Golf, Part 3 -- Finding a new voice for courses as marketing evolves in the age of social media

[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.

A New Decade of Long Island Golf, Part 2 -- Developing lifelong players as time runs low and Long Islanders leave

[For Part 1 of "A New Decade of Long Island Golf," covering some of the main themes of local golf in the 2010s and looking ahead to the 2020s, click here.]

John Borkes opens his back door to a sweeping waterfront view near Freeport's Nautical Mile, and when he plays golf, he's typically right nearby, looking out over the surf from The Golf Club at Middle Bay.  

"I'd love to go around playing different courses, but ultimately I wind up at Middle Bay because it's close to home," Borkes says.  "It's a nice course and it's convenient -- usually I don't have time to go farther and play 18."

Five times a week, Jeff Byer commutes from home in Brooklyn to work in Massapequa Park, and he often adds a sixth trip on the Belt Parkway for 18 holes on the Island.  Ask him and he'll tell you his home course is Bethpage Red, but when time is tight and he can't take another tussle with the Belt, Byer will stay inside the borough at Marine Park. 

"I want time to warm up, get loose, hit some irons.  Go to the practice green and get a feel for my putter," Byer says.  "It's part of the full experience."

While their golf priorities vary, Borkes and Byer have one important thing in common -- they both recently celebrated 30th birthdays, putting them comfortably within the confines of the oft-discussed millennial generation, a group of young adults that will have plenty to say about where Long Island golf stands when the 2020s melt away into 2030.

This past summer, Newsday announced the results of an expansive "nextLI" survey that found two-thirds of Long Island's young adults expect to move off the Island within the next five years, citing the region's high cost of living.  New York State as a whole, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, lost more than 75,000 residents from July 2018 to July 2019, the largest population decline of any state in that time period.

And last month, a study by the Nassau County comptroller's office revealed that the number of Long Island residents between the ages of 20 and 44 has dropped by nearly 10 percent since 2000.

"The Baby Boomers are aging out, and that leaves the millennial generation to pick up the slack and replace rounds," says one Suffolk-based course manager.  "If even half of that 67 percent [in the Newsday report] moves away, public golf courses and private clubs will be in a bad place."

According to the National Golf Foundation, which tracks participation, golfers age 65 and over played an average of 36 rounds in 2018.  Millennials between age 18 and 34, however, played just 11.6 rounds, "a likely byproduct," per NGF, "of increased demands on their time and involvement with a variety of other activities."

"INCREASED DEMANDS ON THEIR TIME"

Time commitment has emerged as perhaps the biggest barrier preventing new players from dipping their toes into the sport and many existing ones from maintaining their preferred frequency of play.  Six-hour blocks of free time -- long the bedrock of a casual, golf-heavy lifestyle -- have given way to shorter, fragmented spurts of activity scattered around non-traditional work schedules, kids' activities and a host of other family obligations. 

"Time is pretty much everyone's main factor, with work and family playing a big part," says Scott Fowler, 37, who plays most of his golf at public courses in western Suffolk.  "If I have to, I'll go out and pay for a round knowing I can only get 12 or 13 holes in."

It's part of the reason modernized nine-hole courses are in vogue nationally, and on a local level as well.  Long Island's only newly built course of the 2010s was the Nickerson Dunes Pitch & Putt, which earned a little bit of golf press with its uncommon design.  Two longtime nine-holers at Sandy Pond and Cedars were rejuvenated last decade by extensive repairs and renovations.  Around the country, refurbished courses like the Winter Park muni in Florida and Sweetens Cove in rural Tennessee are hits that draw golfers from states away.  

Meanwhile, Jack Nicklaus is on record in support of 12-hole rounds.  And the USGA's ongoing "Play 9" campaign centers on the "time-friendly, unwind-friendly" nature of the nine-hole round.  In one Play 9 promo, a bearded, denim-jacketed man on the go -- the unofficial mascot of the millennial crowd -- looks at his watch as the narrator ponders, "Golf and life...how do you fit one into the other?"

The issue is certainly not a new one.  ("The situation is getting worse instead of better, and there seems to be no solution," reads one 1951 Newsday column on slow play.)  In 2011, longtime Newsday golf writer Mark Herrmann covered the sport's time constraints and its possible remedies.  "Golf is expensive and it takes a lot of time," said Steve Smith, then the executive director of the Long Island Golf Association.  "There are reasons why young people don't take up the game and why people stop playing."

"It takes too much time to play golf," former Bethpage pro Joe Rehor told Newsday.  "I see it with my son-in-law.  He's got two kids at home and he can't play golf.  He's got [youth] lacrosse, he's got concerts, he's got this and that.  He's got no time for golf.  If you want to introduce new players to the game, you can't make it so time-consuming."

Fast-forward nine years and time-friendliness has taken on greater urgency, as course closings continue to heavily outpace openings, and the massive boom of mobile technology has shortened attention spans and conditioned people, especially younger ones, to streamline more of their daily routine, including time spent on recreation.  Rapid growth of technology has already changed the way people search for rounds of golf via GolfNow and other tee-time apps.  It's likely just a matter of time before technology changes the way people view the act of playing golf itself.  Once you've grown accustomed to having any conceivable task no farther away than your fingertips, pacing around for 15 minutes on a backed-up par-3 in the middle of a five-hour round feels even more like time poorly spent.

"While time has always been a consideration with golf, I think it makes the game less appetizing to potential players as our society evolves," says Jon Sherman, creator of Practical Golf, a Long Island-based game-improvement website and newsletter.  "How much time are golfers willing to endure?"

Much of the resistance to outside-the-box solutions revolves around the sport's traditions.  Ideas like 12-hole rounds are dismissed by some as gimmicks destined to fail; others consider them too radical for a local public course to explore on its own without proof of success.

"It's hard to be the first to experiment with something new, there's so much uncertainty," says Andrew Wilson, Bethpage's director of agronomy.  "If statistics say most people want to play 18, is it worth focusing on six holes or nine holes?"

Ryan Stewart, 31, is at peace with the length of play and willing to endure the five-hour-plus round if it means getting in a full 18.  "Anything less than 18 holes is just not enough for me.  The only time I play less than 18 is after work when I run out of daylight," says Stewart, who admits the recent arrival of twins might alter his perception of golf's time crunch.

"I don’t see additions of 12- or six-hole rounds fixing the time problem on the 18-hole courses," he adds.  "We have plenty of nine-hole courses around here but I rarely ever see a wait."

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So with time at a premium, priorities shifting away from half-days at the course and the pool of prospective players shrinking locally, it would seem imperative that Long Island's public golf courses stake their claim to what remains of young adults' time and attention, and fight to turn them from hesitant prospective golfers to potential lifelong players and customers.  Perhaps come up with mutually beneficial ways to get them into the clubhouse, onto the course and headed home in two or three hours rather than five or six.  Especially now, when businesses can brainstorm fresh ideas at little to no cost and deliver them right where young adults spend much of their time -- on their phones, perusing social media.

But while Long Island restaurants, farm stands, coffee shops, breweries and breakfast joints have figured out ways to build and captivate audiences -- in some cases thousands of followers deep -- with eye-catching photos and video clips, Long Island golf courses have largely sat hidden away in self-imposed online anonymity.

Check back next week for Part 3 of "A New Decade of Long Island Golf," which will address local golf's marketing and self-promotion in the social-media era.

A New Decade of Long Island Golf, Part 1 -- A changed landscape, on and off the course

Another decade of Long Island golf is coming to a close -- the thirteenth, to be exact, since the first shots went airborne at Shinnecock Hills in the 1890s.  Some have been decadent, others disastrous, and while the 2010s didn't meet either of those extremes, it will certainly go down as a decade of significant change to the Long Island golf landscape.

Golf On Long Island spoke with representatives from Long Island's public golf courses as well as members of golf media, a cross-section of area players and figures in related businesses to get their perspective on the local golf scene at the dawn of a new decade.  What follows are some of the significant topics and themes related to Long Island's public golf courses and public golfers as the 2010s leave us and the 2020s approach the first tee.

Check back after the new year for Part 2, focusing on junior golf and the conversion of young adults into lifelong players.

CLOSINGS, OPENINGS AND PROTECTING GOLF COURSES

Tallgrass Golf Course in Shoreham entered the 2010s already fending off development plans.  As far back as 2008, the Gil Hanse course announced in promos that it was "here to stay."  Indeed it was -- for nearly a full decade, before a solar-energy company took over the land and ripped up a facility that had been named among the "Best Courses You Can Play" in New York State by Golfweek for nine straight years.

Course closures on Long Island mirrored the national trend in the last decade.  Simply put, far more courses are shutting down than opening, a correction of the wild building race of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Its persistence meant that Tallgrass was the last course to fall off the public roster in the 2010s, preceded by other East Enders at The Links at Shirley, Calverton Links and Long Island National (sold and turned private).  The quaint nine-hole Dix Hills Golf Club closed to make way for luxury housing.  And Hurricane Sandy ended a long run for the Jones Beach Pitch and Putt, its oceanfront site beside the iconic park tower always prone to abuse by coastal storms.

Out of Sandy's wrath in 2012 came one addition to Long Island's list of public courses.  The private Middle Bay Country Club, an Oceanside fixture since the 1950s, was battered by the storm and forced into bankruptcy.  Savvy maintenance work and some good luck with post-Sandy weather allowed the course to reopen the following spring as the newly public, freshly titled South Bay Country Club.  Lease issues threw more hurdles in its path, but eventually the course settled into its current identity as The Golf Club at Middle Bay.

"We've had a steady increase in rounds every year," says golf director Ronnie Wright.  "We're at full capacity Friday through Sunday, and we do well on Wednesdays when Lido and Merrick are closed." 

Pace of play is the club's selling point, Wright says, though golfers, especially water lovers, might insist it's the proximity to the bay.  Its signature hole is a par-4 with the bay down the left side and a collection of bunkers nearly forming a ring of sand around the green.  Beyond the green is a clear view toward Long Beach.

Last year, Middle Bay -- featured in the November/December issue of The Met Golfer -- was part of a Town of Hempstead proposal aimed at protecting golf courses against residential development.  Hempstead's plan, designed to prevent the recently sold Woodmere Club from closing in 2022, would designate Middle Bay and the private courses at the Woodmere Club and Inwood Country Club as "golf course coastal residence districts."  The new category would restrict residential development due to environmental issues like flooding and impact on area wetlands. 

Woodmere, its roots more than a century deep in Five Towns, is one of a small handful of golf facilities already slated for at least partial development in the near future -- others include the public Heatherwood Golf Course in Setauket, to be cut down from 18 to nine holes to make way for senior housing, and the century-old Engineers Country Club in Roslyn, where residences are planned around the existing private golf course.   

Previously in 2017, the Town of Brookhaven went ahead and created a new zoning category -- "golf course district" -- and has since redesignated the town-owned Mill Pond and Rolling Oaks golf courses and the privately owned Rock Hill Golf & Country Club.  Properties zoned as golf course districts can build catering halls, restaurants and health clubs on site, but homes, non-golf offices and retail stores are not permitted.

And in early December 2019, the Town of Southold, in a deal facilitated by The Peconic Land Trust, purchased the development rights to the land housing Island's End Golf & Country Club in Greenport.  The $5.1 million purchase by the town ensures that the 126 acres bordering Long Island Sound will be free from development and likely preserved as a golf course, per Newsday.

Closures also impacted the driving-range business around the Island.  At least three large ranges closed since 2011 -- first to go was Island Green in Selden, followed by the Oakdale Golf Center and, most recently in 2017, Skydrive Golf Center in Farmingdale.  Many of those lost stalls will be replaced if a proposed Topgolf -- New York's first -- opens in Holtsville in the near future. (More on that below.)

[PICTURED: Top right -- Calverton Links, three months before abruptly closing down in 2013; Top left -- The view toward Long Beach and Jones Beach from the signature hole at Middle Bay in Oceanside; Bottom right -- Skydrive's farewell note to customers prior to closing in 2017.]

NINE-HOLE GOLF: RENOVATIONS AND NEW BEACH VIBES

The loss of Dix Hills GC notwithstanding, the 2010s marked a mini renaissance for nine-hole golf on Long Island.  It's status quo at the Nassau munis -- Bay Park rang in its 50th year this season with zero fanfare -- but out east, two tucked-away nine-hole spots were reinvigorated by new, hands-on owners.

In Cutchogue, nestled among quiet streets behind the village green and community library is Cedars Golf Club, a fixture since the 1960s on land utilized for golf for more than a century.  Tim McManus and Paul Pawlowski took over the course in 2014 and made immediate changes -- bunker and green renovations, irrigation upgrades, brush clearing and more.  They added a comfy patio, built a simulator room in the vintage clubhouse and partnered with a company to offer kayak and paddleboard rentals in a creek off the ninth hole.

"Cedars has definitely exceeded our expectations," McManus says.  "Every time I'm at the course I hear compliments from players on the conditions and the overall friendliness of the experience."

Nearly the same story played out a few seasons prior in Riverhead, long the home of Sandy Pond Golf Course, another nine-holer hidden in plain sight behind an anonymous shack amid more familiar 18-hole neighbors.  It got a shot in the arm in 2012 from two new owners, Ken Weinstein and Chris Wahlers, who dug right in cleaning out ponds, resurfacing tees, repairing greens and clearing overgrowth around the perimeter.  By 2014, the course gleamed with golden-brown grass between holes, colorful flower beds and vibrant green fairways.

“We’re noticing more skilled golfers coming to play,” Wahlers told Golf On Long Island at the time.  "And people from the area are coming by and saying they never knew the course was here.”

The crew continues to run successful leagues and unique night-golf events.

While Cedars and Sandy Pond underwent their annual upgrades, another little course took shape out of the barren sandscape way back west in Lido Beach.  Not that many people knew about it at the time -- outside of a county press release and a few news snippets, the Nickerson Dunes Pitch & Putt, Long Island's only newly built public course of the 2010s, came to be in beachfront secrecy. 

Holes start out from turf mats with rubber tees and stretch no longer than 105 yards, but that simplicity is countered by the course's sloping greens, hilly terrain and features like punchbowls and grass mounds.  Salvaged boardwalk planks stand in as walking paths and, on one hole, the retaining wall around a desert-style waste area.  So noteworthy is the layout that The Fried Egg, a prominent golf design and architecture website, featured the course in 2019, holding it up as a shining example of modern entry-level golf.

"You could work a couple of Nickersons into just about any town -- nine holes on 10 acres, or four holes on five acres.  At that size, golf courses cost far less to build and maintain, and could even fit into existing parks," writes The Fried Egg's Shaun Smith.  "We need more ambient golf.  If my daughter wants to pick up tennis or basketball or baseball in the future, it will be easy because the playing spaces will be right there.  Golf may never be that open, but it could get closer."

[PICTURED: Above left -- looking up to a hilltop green at Sandy Pond, post-renovation in 2014; Above right -- Nickerson Dunes was featured by The Fried Egg's Shaun Smith (@GorseNod on Twitter); Screenshot courtesy of The Fried Egg (@the_fried_egg)]

BETHPAGE

If the 2000s thrust Bethpage Black into the spotlight as the new rock star on the national golf scene, then the 2010s was the decade the "People's Country Club" matured into a polished, well-coiffed celeb.  By the time Brooks Koepka walked off the Black clutching the Wanamaker Trophy as winner of the 2019 PGA Championship this past May, the Black had added two editions of The Barclays to its resume (2012 and 2016) and earned the right to host the 2024 Ryder Cup.

And with its years-long march toward the 2019 PGA coinciding with the rise of Golf Twitter and Instagram, more and more of the Black's daily happenings -- from fairway, tee and green renovations to updates on pollinator gardens -- were chronicled in real time.  Andrew Wilson, the park's director of agronomy and sporter of many hats during a lengthy tenure at Bethpage (including past jobs in the clubhouse and as a starter), is the man behind many of those updates, keeping followers in the loop with frequent glimpses of scenes around the grounds. 

Wilson was front-and-center during PGA week, talking up the Black Course on TV, radio and podcasts.  And as Wilson discussed the meat and potatoes, other outlets poured on the dressing.  Over on sites like Golf Club Atlas, spirited debates quickly ignited on course setup while Golf Magazine's Josh Berhow took a deep dive through anecdotes and fuzzy memories in an effort to pinpoint the origin of the famous "Warning" sign.

For Wilson, the famous Joe DiMaggio quote, the one about giving his all because a kid might be seeing him play for the first time, is always in mind.

"We know people travel from all over to play at Bethpage," Wilson says, "so we want to give them the best experience we can."

Though locals and tourists might arrive at Bethpage with higher expectations now that the Black Course has been a household name nationally for nearly two decades, the focus around the grounds remains on simply putting the best foot forward.  Much of the maintenance work is the same as it was at the close of the 2000s.  Technology has obviously improved, taking much of the guesswork out of course conditions.  And the staff now has years of experience preparing for major events -- Wilson says this offseason's renovation of the bunkers on Black #4 are being done with one eye on the '24 Ryder Cup.  The staff is also considering shortening the turf around traps to bring more of them into play, among other changes.

Off the course, Bethpage -- and its fellow NYS park courses at Montauk Downs and Sunken Meadow -- took a leap into the 21st century with the long-overdue switch to an online tee-time portal.  New golf director Kelley Brooke, another Bethpage multitasker ("I'm running everything here but tee times," she told Golf On Long Island last year), has plans to lengthen the driving range and expand the facility's use of state-of-the-art video and biofeedback systems for instruction.  A primary goal is to make Bethpage a "full-service academy" with instructional programs, clinics and camps.

Behind the scenes, a marketing team focused on revamping the facility's digital presence.  For way too long until 2018, Bethpage was represented on the internet by a bleak website half-focused on hawking apparel.  Brooke hired Zach Toste, a digital-marketing consultant who played golf at Notre Dame, to craft an online personality befitting the country's most prominent public-golf facility.

Toste and the digital-marketing team introduced "Experience Tradition" as the park's slogan and filled its rebuilt social-media feeds with video demonstrations, action shots around the course and other features.

"There was a sense of urgency due to the upcoming PGA Championship," Toste says.  "Until then there had been no sense of history on the site.  Our initial focus was on tradition and history, bringing the courses' stories and milestones to light."

With the PGA event in the past, much of the online focus now is on Brooke's successful junior programs, including the park's first-ever summer camp, started in 2018.

"It's nice being out on the course and seeing 40 or 50 young kids playing," Wilson says.

[PICTURED ABOVE: First two photos -- scenes from the PGA Championship in May 2019; Bottom right -- Wilson's Twitter updates (@Greensideup17) on the Bethpage courses recently included photos of renovations to the famous glacier bunker on Black #4.]

GOLFNOW

The last holdouts -- Bethpage and the NYS parks, plus Oyster Bay this season -- finally hung up on the phone-reservation era last year, though that doesn't mean the phone-reservation era actually ended.  It just means dialing is old news.  Tapping and scrolling for rounds of golf via GolfNow and other reservation apps has made locking down 18 holes easier than ever and revolutionized the tee-sheet business.  Golfers can now find nearby tee times the same way they find Christmas gifts on Amazon -- by initiating a search and perusing the results.  And in an era where time is of the essence, any convenience is valued.

GolfNow didn't emerge in the 2010s, but its massive financial backing from NBC Sports and Golf Channel allowed it to gradually acquire other booking engines (the latest as recently as last month) in a decade where online commerce and mobile technology rapidly grew more sophisticated, accelerating the company's growth into an industry behemoth.  The company boasts 3.5 million registered users worldwide that can book rounds at more than 7,000 courses.  On Long Island, public green fees have remained close to the same as they were a decade ago, while tee-time apps streamline the search for heavy discounts.

The prize catch for the player on a GolfNow search is the small inventory of "Hot Deal" tee times at each course that slash green fees by as much as 80 percent.  Like the base economy rate of an airline ticket or a hotel room, the Hot Deal price is paid up front and non-refundable.  And taking that comparison even further, GolfNow offers a rewards program that allows players to earn points on booked tee times.  So between the convenience, the potential discounts and rewards, it's a win for the player.

But on the business end of the transaction, not everyone is sold on the merits of GolfNow.  Critics in the golf-course industry argue that by training consumers to treat golf courses the same as a pack of boxer shorts on Amazon, GolfNow is pressuring courses to price their rounds too low to remain sustainable.  And by further incentivizing bookings through GolfNow, the benefits to the player ultimately come at the expense of the facilities they play.

"The cost to operate and maintain a golf course increases 3 to 6 percent per year, yet green fees remain the same price as they were in 2008," says one Suffolk course manager.  "The GolfNow model is helpful to some but damaging to others.  Operators cannot increase green fees because people simply won't pay it.  Eventually there is a breaking point."

The structure of the popular Hot Deal is largely the source of critics' concerns.  GolfNow's agreements with courses require each facility to trade a certain number of tee times every day in exchange for use of GolfNow's booking platform and other perks like website design and e-mail marketing.  Those exchanged tee times are then promoted as deeply discounted Hot Deals, paid in full to GolfNow, not to the course.  Then GolfNow heavily promotes its available Hot Deals in a particular region (see screenshot below) and pushes them to the front of searches, ahead of the rest of the standard-rate tee times paid to the course.  GolfNow is helping courses up with two hands, the argument goes, while kicking their legs out from under them.

Wright at Middle Bay says he's not fully for or against GolfNow.  "We definitely needed them to help us get off the ground," he says.  "Their advertising can be very helpful."

On the other hand, "I've never seen a relationship where one side always benefits," Wright says.  "You have to watch what's going on and stay on top of them when issues arise, otherwise the course loses out."

Part of the reason local courses don't ditch the GolfNow model is fear of the unknown.  Courses not under the GolfNow umbrella do not appear in searches.  So a consumer scrolling for tee times by zip code might think he or she is getting a full, real-time menu of golf in a particular area, when that's not the case.

"I would bet a lot of money that if the public owners could get together, they would agree not to participate in GolfNow," says the Suffolk manager.  "The only reason they are using it now is that everyone else is."

Supporters of GolfNow argue that this is simply business at work, that the aggregation of tee times is yet another positive innovation of the modern digital marketplace.  Anything that helps lead more players to local courses should be considered a win for the industry.

Sometimes the lines are blurry.  A search for tee times on a recent December afternoon revealed a $15 mid-day Hot Deal at Eisenhower Park's White Course.  Eisenhower, of course, is a Nassau County muni, and residents pay the county for Leisure Pass access to tee times and resident golf rates.  Yet an arrangement with GolfNow allows all comers to swoop in and pay much less.

As for the tens of thousands of dollars worth of tech and marketing services acquired in the tee-time trade (one daily tee time at $40 per player is worth more than $50,000 annually), the courses still have to get their hands dirty to get their money's worth.  Needless to say, a GolfNow-sponsored e-mail blast that is simply a tee-time ad with a course logo on top is not a sound marketing strategy. 

Neither is what went on at Great Rock this past season.  The Wading River course fell into disrepair in 2019 while its Twitter feed and e-mail blasts pumped out almost nothing but generic GolfNow ads linking to tee-time lists.  The course abruptly shut down for the season in October, and its e-mail and social-media campaigns subsequently refocused on the fact that the course is, well, closed.

[PICTURED ABOVE:  GolfNow prioritizes the sale of its Hot Deal tee times, a practice that some in the golf-course industry argue is more harmful to courses than helpful.  Screenshot courtesy GolfNow.com] 

TOPGOLF

Unofficially, the topic that inspires the most chatter among Golf On Long Island readers is the prospect of Topgolf making its New York debut in Suffolk County.  And, as of now, it will, on a site just north of the Long Island Expressway at exit 62 in Holtsville.  It's made its way through government proceedings, faced the requisite share of NIMBY opposition, and appears to be in the clear provided it meets some conditions outlined by the Brookhaven Town planning board in September.

Topgolf adds elements of a trip to Dave & Buster's to the typical driving-range experience, allowing players to hit microchipped golf balls toward arcade-style target areas for computer-scored games and contests, in addition to food and drinks.  Climate-controlled hitting bays are rented by the hour and typically include televisions, WiFi and access to food and drinks.  Standard range features like lessons and clinics are also included.

There are nearly 60 Topgolf locations generating lots of buzz around the country and overseas, including a Las Vegas site that lives up to its locale with glass-walled swimming pools and a concert venue.  The question that remains unanswered in golf circles is whether or not the popularity of Topgolf actually makes green-fee-paying golfers out of its many followers.

"I can't wait for it to be built," says one local course manager.  "I only see it as a benefit, getting more people interested and increasing rounds locally."

"Any time we can get a golf club in somebody's hand, it's good for the game," says Middle Bay's Wright, who adds it could also benefit local PGA pros if they get the opportunity to give lessons in the offseason.  "Even if it's having fun over a beer and a bucket of wings, it will be helpful in growing the sport."

Andy Carracino, PGA pro and director of golf at Timber Point, agrees Topgolf is good for the sport but is unsure if it's a match for Long Island.  "It's up to the industry to turn those Topgolf customers into 'real' golfers," he says.  "My hunch is it's too big an investment to succeed here.  Too many off days between October and April for a return, and the winter storms will kill the equipment."

At the moment there is no timetable for when the Long Island Topgolf might open, and it's not listed among the dozen "Coming Soon" locations on the company website.  For now, Long Island golfers will have to travel at least as far as central New Jersey to get their Topgolf fix.

[PICTURED ABOVE:  Topgolf in Edison, New Jersey, currently the closest location to Long Island.  Photo courtesy Topgolf.]

COULD A SWEETENS COVE WORK ON LONG ISLAND?

In September, Rob Collins and Tad King leaked word of their latest golf design project.  Nine holes of ambitious New York fairways and greens, roughly 90 minutes from Manhattan, sure to draw scores of players from the city onto area parkways, golf bags in tow. 

The two partners -- together known officially as King-Collins Golf Course Design -- are the darlings of modern golf architecture thanks to their work transforming a flat, unremarkable golf course in rural Tennessee into a pilgrimage site for followers of golf design and those simply seeking a fresh take on the golf experience.  It's been featured in the New York Times, hailed as a model of innovation in Sports Illustrated and profiled by golf publications whose writers chronicle their journeys to Sweetens Cove -- formerly known as Sequatchie Valley Golf & Country Club -- with pictures of the course's weathered signs and tiny shed of a clubhouse.  Golfweek ranked it #49 on its 2019 list of top modern courses, a rarity for nine-hole layouts.

Sweetens Cove and other similar projects around the country -- Winter Park in Florida, a revamped muni, for one -- might just be setting the foundation for the post-Recession, post-Tiger wave of American course building.  Taking spent or outdated golf grounds and reimagining them with a focus on bold features, strategic design, no-frills fun and a streamlined building process that allows for affordable public and municipal golf. 

Reimagining golf is the key -- as Collins told the Times, "People had been building golf courses completely wrong for years."  He and King are already in the very early stages of an unnamed project in Mississippi where the finished product would be a 12-hole course -- a nine-holer with a separate three-hole loop. 

The King-Collins project in New York will not be east of the city out in these parts though, it will be north, a meandering drive from the Thruway in a town called Accord.  Nine new holes are in progress on what previously was Rondout Golf Club.  The 18-hole course is being cut to nine by King and Collins while the rest of the property will be bolstered with a boutique hotel, cabins and shops.

Innovative golf design, limited amenities and daring features, all with a laid-back, player-friendly mentality -- could it work on Long Island?  Rob Collins thinks so.

"I have no doubt it would be a huge success," Collins told Golf On Long Island earlier this month.  At Sweetens, much of the challenge for the designers was bringing their new ideas to life and succeeding in a rural area of a depressed county, as Collins describes it.  That wouldn't be the case here.

"Sweetens Cove was the ultimate pie-in-the-sky project," Collins said.  "There's a lot less risk on Long Island.  You have a built-in golf population, and most of the great courses are private.  If you could make a course on par with the privates that's open to the public for an affordable price, why wouldn't it work?"

"Something like Sweetens would do wonders to help grow the game," said one Long Island general manager.  "I hear it so often from people who don't play -- they don't know how to get started and they are afraid of embarrassing themselves.

"The focus is to eliminate the formalities of what golf has always been and have a course that is available to the public where the emphasis is fun."

Jeff Warne, director of golf at The Bridge, isn't sold. 

"The availability of cheap golf on Long Island, even with recent closings at Tallgrass, Shirley and Calverton Links, make it unlikely," Warne says.  "A municipality could easily pull it off, with the model being Winter Park, but I don't see government on Long Island doing it."

But given the recent success stories on the nine-hole front, and other changes coming to the area, perhaps the 2020s will prove to be the right time for some innovation on the Long Island golf scene.

"You will see how many people buy into an idea like this once Topgolf opens," says the local GM.  "I think the younger generation would eat this up."

A half-century in East Rock: Nassau muni Bay Park in the midst of its 50th-anniversary season

It's a special season at Bay Park Golf Course, though you won't find any milestones announced on a banner billowing over the park entrance or stretched across the facade of the course's faceless, utilitarian brick clubhouse.  There are no anniversary logos printed on hats and polos, no leather-bound books to chronicle the course's half-century beside the bay in East Rockaway.  No turn-back-the-clock green-fee specials with yesteryear pricing, for sure.  And if even a small handful of local golfers are aware that Bay Park made its debut the same year as Joe Namath's guarantee and the Miracle Mets, it likely won't come up in conversation. 

What you can bank on though is a scanned Leisure Pass, a point in the direction of the first tee and another day of basic nine-hole golf with local youngsters, seniors and all the groups of novices in between.

Bay Park has quietly gone about its business serving Nassau golfers since 1969, making this its 50th-anniversary season.  Tucked away at the southern edge of a recently rejuvenated Bay Park complex that's just about unrecognizable to even the longest of longtime visitors, the golf course itself remains a familiar throwback, its hilltop first and second greens standing tall behind a chain-link fence, leading golfers toward the bay.

With the golf world slowly readjusting its focus more toward accessible public and municipal golf for all, there's a certain charm to functional Bay Park and its Nassau County Parks brethren at North Woodmere, Cantiague and Christopher Morley.  Bay Park is free of pizzazz.  There are no dramatic, stylishly shadowed photos of its greens, few travel more than a couple of minutes to play it, and those who do swing by don't record their visit with pristinely filtered social-media tales.  It's simply golf pared down to its core -- grandkids learning the game with grandfathers, little sister swinging alongside big brother, groups of young friends and groups of seniors, all playing nine holes over 1,900-plus mostly flat yards at the neighborhood golf course.

Bay Park opened for play in 1969 on the site of a former dump with green fees of $1.25 on weekdays and $2 on weekends.  The course's debut wasn't without some Long Island-style political drama -- in December 1968, it was announced that Bay Park's spring opening would be postponed due to budget cuts.  So that spring and summer, with the course already built and prepared for play, it sat empty except for a crew completing the clubhouse building and a single greenskeeper tending to the grass.  Meanwhile, local residents and community groups bombarded the office of Nassau County Executive Eugene Nickerson with complaints, per Newsday.

When a reworked budget "found" some money to cover operating costs, the golf course opened in late summer.  Unlike today's course, the 1969 version was equipped with light stanchions that would allow for night play.  "I used to hit those poles all the time," says William Kienke, who lived near the course on Rhame Avenue.  "Big wooden poles like the ones on the way to Jones Beach.  Great ricochet."

Another East Rockaway resident at the time recalls how it was impossible to track the flight of the ball once it went above the lights during nighttime rounds.  Night golf at Bay Park, however, was very short-lived -- due to issues with water pressure, soil moisture and wiring, the lights rarely worked as designed.  "The lights were terrible and didn't last too long," he says.  "After they took the lights down, they left the poles up for years, which made bad shots even worse."

The course has seen its highs and lows over the half century.  It opened near the tail end of the 1960s/early-1970s Long Island golf growth spurt that introduced dozens of modern public and private courses and nearly all of today's county municipal layouts.  Long Island began to shed courses through the 1980s, but once the Tiger Woods era boomed in the late '90s, Bay Park, like most other courses, was jammed.  As Tiger took the golf world by storm, waits to get on Bay Park's 299-yard opening par-4 were often measured in hours. 

Valley Stream native Matt Krantweiss played Bay Park in between two-a-day soccer practices nearby at Valley Stream South High School in the late summers of 1997 and 1998.  "After morning practices we'd go over to Bay Park to get nine holes in before we had to be back in the afternoon," he says.  "The wait was so long, with so many groups waiting to tee off on each hole, we rarely could finish nine holes."

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy took down trees on the course and littered it with debris from boats docked nearby, along with other courses on the south shore that were submerged by ocean and bay waters.

Today, just about everything about the park has changed, including the access road that leads visitors down toward the course, though once on the fairways and greens, there's not much to tip off whether it's 1969 or 2019 -- save for the lack of light poles, of course.

For more on Bay Park, check out the course flyover.

Original Lido Club featured on Golf Channel, golf history podcast

Amid its wall-to-wall PGA Championship coverage at Bethpage Black earlier this week, the Golf Channel aired a short but fascinating six-minute feature on a lesser-known Long Island golf powerhouse, one that's long gone but certainly not forgotten by followers of golf history.

The segment covered the original Lido Club (1914-1942) with insight provided by Connor Lewis of the Society of Golf Historians and golf architect Jim Urbina, both of whom have extensively researched the C.B. Macdonald classic, a course considered by many during its brief peak to be among the greatest golf courses ever built.  Last year, Lewis walked the routing of the original club, tracing the locations of its famous holes that are now buried beneath Lido Beach homes and schools or part of Lido West Town Park.  Lewis even teed up a few shots on the site of the oceanfront par-3 eighth, now a public beach.  Lewis and Urbina walk through some of these locations in the segment.

Bringing all the black-and-white historical imagery to life are incredibly detailed computer renderings of the Lido produced by Peter Flory, a Michigan-based golfer with an appreciation for lost golf courses.  His work on the Lido has spanned hundreds of hours recreating the course using available photos, models and aerial images.  Much of his work to date has been published on the Golf Club Atlas discussion forum.

View the feature on the Golf Channel website.

This weekend, Lewis and Urbina went into deeper detail on Rod Morri's TalkinGolf History podcast:

In the podcast, Lewis, Urbina and Morri discuss the history of Lido as well as their exploration of the current site, efforts to recreate the course elsewhere, and the search for long-lost course photos taken by the family owners right before its WWII-era demise.

For additional info on the group's work, visit the Society of Golf Historians Twitter page.

And be sure to check out Golf On Long Island's previous coverage of the Lido Club:

A brief look back at the original Lido Golf Club in its "centennial" season
Street Names: The Ghosts of Long Island Golf's Past, Part 2 (Lido Club)
Newsday slideshow features 11 places that were formerly golf courses
Closer Look: Lido Golf Club #16

Also, the Lido Club is prominently featured in the photo-history book "Images of America: Long Island Golf" by GOLI's Phil Carlucci.  Follow the preceding link for more info or click the book image at the top of the page.

Bethpage Black in "fine shape" as PGA Championship approaches, plus aeration and non-Black updates

Golfers returning to Bethpage State Park for early-spring golf have been treated to some uncommon scenery as the PGA Championship, formerly of August, looms just weeks away in May.  For one, a look deep into the distance at the first green on the Red Course includes a view past roughly 300 yards of tents sitting atop the Red's opening fairway next to Black's 18th.  Over on the Green Course, the opening and closing fairways are barely visible beneath more structures.

All eyes will be on the Black Course come mid-May, of course, and thanks to a rather uneventful winter, conditions for the first northeast-in-spring PGA will be ideal, barring any surprises.  "The turf made it through the winter in fine shape," says Andrew Wilson, Bethpage's director of agronomy.  "We have sodded many typical wear areas on the Black Course and plugged out thousands of ball marks on the greens.  Now we are checking sand depths in bunkers and cleaning up debris all over the course."

Today the Black still looks a bit like a course in winter, though it should green up with leaves emerging on the trees by the time golfers are invited back for a brief two-week stint from April 13 to 28.  The course will be open for walk-ups only on an abbreviated daily schedule.  Needless to say, spots on tee will be in ultra-high demand.

Combined with the renovations made last winter -- most notably, modification of the bunker complex on #18 and a green extension on #11 -- the early-season nature of this year's PGA ensures the professionals will see a different course than the one they've challenged in summer conditions during past U.S. Opens and Barclays events.  Change will be evident from the very first shot -- a handful of elm trees were moved from the left to the right of #1 fairway last offseason with this year's PGA in mind.

Besides housing the many pavilions, merchandise shops and hospitality tents for the tournament, the other four courses at Bethpage are getting their own tweaks as well.  "On the Green Course, we rebuilt the bunker on #3 and cleared some of the woodline on #7 of vines and invasive species," Wilson says.  A new forward tee is going in on Red #5, which for now will be the main tee as PGA construction occupies the back-tee area.  Sand is being added to bunkers where needed around the complex.

Amid the rest of the PGA prep, the non-Black courses are scheduled for spring aeration later this month.  The Red Course will be first to go on April 30, followed by Blue on May 1, Yellow on May 2 and Green on May 3.

Players can expect to be reminded of the PGA's presence throughout most of the 2019 season.  The Black is slated to resume normal operations on May 25, though Wilson says it will take several months for all the structures to come down and for the courses to be restored to familiar conditions.  Current temporary tees will remain in place for a while on #1 of the Red, Green and Blue courses, plus Green #18.  Yellow will continue to play as a modified nine-hole course skipping around to avoid tourney construction.

"Our crew will work as hard as we can to produce conditions our golfers appreciate," Wilson says.

View photos of the offseason and ongoing PGA prep by visiting Wilson's and Bethpage Golf's Twitter pages at @Greensideup17 and @BethpageGolf.

View photos of the offseason and ongoing PGA prep by visiting Wilson's and Bethpage Golf's Twitter pages at @Greensideup17 and @BethpageGolf.

Town of Oyster Bay Golf Course set to ring in its 30th-anniversary season

It was still far short of sunrise in the early-morning hours of April 18, 1989, yet a line of cars stretched near the gates of what had long been a leafy, bucolic private estate at Jericho Turnpike and Southwoods Road in Woodbury.  Inside those cars, dozens of local golfers sat waiting to secure a spot on tee at the first Long Island golf course built in a decade.

Once the sun brightened the sky over northern Nassau, the Town of Oyster Bay Golf Course officially joined the Long Island golf landscape, welcomed by hundreds of golfers -- nearly 300, per a Newsday recap the following day -- who gave the Tom Fazio design rave reviews.  This year is the municipal course's 30th anniversary.  Opening day is Tuesday, April 2.

This year's golfers will find some subtle differences around the course from when they last left it in the fall.  Cart paths have been added or repaved throughout the course, and dozens of trees were trimmed or removed to open up areas of play. 

"The goal of the trimming project was to make the course more player-friendly, less difficult for the average player and to provide more sunlight exposure on the course to achieve better grass growth," according to Oyster Bay town supervisor Joseph Saladino.  "The Town also purchased new golf carts and implemented a plan to purchase ten new golf carts annually to replenish the fleet.  Additional projects planned for the near future include improving tee boxes and bunkers, and refining areas near and around the course's water features."

Saladino said all improvement projects are being performed under the expertise of the course's new greenskeeper, Greg Kolodinsky, and new consultant Steve Matuza.

Despite heavy play, its name designer and a variety of truly impressive holes, Oyster Bay carries on in relative anonymity among outsiders, rarely spoken of in conversations about Long Island's best publics.  Perhaps it's due to past restrictions on advance tee times and what used to be a convoluted tangle of green fees and membership rates that ultimately made a trip to Woodbury cost-prohibitive for the curious one- or two-time visitor.  Or maybe its location just five miles north of one of the most recognizable public golf facilities in the nation at Bethpage leaves it overshadowed.  Town government seems eager to draw a more rightful amount of attention to its course -- Newsday reported in March that the town will run advertisements in New York Mets game programs at Citi Field during the 2019 season.  And for the first time in the course's history, tee times can now be booked online and are available for both members (30 days in advance) and non-members (seven days).

Those who do know the course are aware of its hilly, challenging layout that includes one of Long Island's most daunting par-4s.  The fourth doglegs to a blind landing area on the right before marching dead uphill to an obscured, triple-tiered green (pictured left).  The hill itself is covered in rough-length grass and features a long, snaking bunker.  Later, the 16th makes a harder dogleg turn to the right, this time leaving golfers with a full, unobstructed view on the approach, which features an elevated green cut into a rolling hillside (pictured below).  Oyster Bay's par-3s all feature either dramatically sloped greens, notable elevation changes or intrusive bunkering, if not some combination of the three.   

Part of what made the debut of the Oyster Bay course so highly anticipated 30 years ago was the era in which it came to be.  Locally, the 1980s was associated only with course closures, not openings.  The historic Links Club in Roslyn, an exclusive 1919 C.B. Macdonald course, was sold that decade with development of condos in the plans.  The failed, celebrity-boasting "superclub" experiment at Muttontown's Charter Oaks in the late 1960s ended quietly in 1982 as a course called Fox Run.  The course-building resurgence of the 1960s and early '70s -- which introduced many of Long Island's current municipal facilities -- had slowed by the time Swan Lake Golf Course arrived in Manorville in 1979.  In the years that followed, the climate was simply not conducive to golf development.  Even a decade later, Oyster Bay's early success was viewed merely as a one-off.  In his recap of Oyster Bay's opening day, Newsday's Mark Herrmann cautioned that Long Island's shiny new course was "perhaps its last for a long time."  Of course, few could have predicted the Tiger-fueled building craze that would arrive soon after.

Adding to the excitement was the history of the grounds.  Like many other post-1950s golf courses on Long Island -- especially those around Nassau's "Gold Coast" -- Oyster Bay's fairways and greens sprung from a repurposed private estate.  "Woodlands" was built in 1918 and designed by noted architect William Adams Delano.  In 1928 it was sold to industrialist, philanthropist and politician Andrew Mellon, who gifted the 121-acre estate to his daughter, Ailsa, as a wedding present.  Ailsa, a philanthropist described by the New York Times in her 1969 obituary as the "richest woman in the U.S.," married diplomat David Bruce and remained there until her death.  Oyster Bay Town bought the Bruce estate in 1979.  According to Newsday, supervisor Joseph Colby -- whose name was added to the course in 2013 -- first visualized using the grounds for golf during a visit to Woodlands.

Players don't venture into the estate house -- now a wedding and event venue called The Mansion at Oyster Bay -- during their visits, though they do get a brief taste of old estate life late in their round.  The par-3 12th tees off directly in front of an elegant brick patio at the rear of the mansion.  The tiny 117-yard hole is not as easy as it seems, with a bunker in front and a green that slopes to a hidden rear water hazard, plus the chance of cocktail-hour guests watching over the shot.

The Town of Oyster Bay Golf Course also includes the Lucas Golf Center, which operates the driving range, pro shop and private instruction and is already open for the season.  

For more on Oyster Bay, visit the Golf On Long Island course flyover.

Origins: The Golf Club at Middle Bay

Golf On Long Island's "Origins" series explores the history and development of those local golf courses whose backstory is a bit more unique than most.  Stay tuned for more as the season progresses.

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Ralph Trost, chronicler of local golf history for the early-20th-century Brooklyn Daily Eagle, summed up the "epidemic of golf-course building" in the late stages of the Roaring Twenties and the dawn of the Depression era like this:

"One day you see a farm, a wood or meadowland.  A few days afterward a sign pops up announcing a new golf course and before long that sign is gone and in its stead one sees acres of plowed land, the rounded forms of greens rising from the flatness."

Golf courses exploded during the booming 1920s, but clubs that waited until late in the decade or into the '30s to post those signs ahead of new layouts found themselves cornered by financial crisis right from the opening drive.  Some persevered, though most were short-lived.  One of the rare "success" stories remains in Oceanside. 

The Golf Club at Middle Bay knows plenty about perseverance.  At the beginning of this current decade, it was a 55-year-old private club.  Two years later Hurricane Sandy arrived, inflicting millions of dollars worth of damage to the grounds, clubhouse and equipment, and the club made the decision to close in the face of bankruptcy.  Within months, a former member resurrected the club as the semi-private, publicly accessible South Bay Country Club.  After only one season, issues with the lease led to another brief closure, a new operator and a new identity as The Golf Club at Middle Bay.

But rewind to the early 1930s, when Trost's description of the course-building rush served as the lede to a story about yet another new course, this one called the Oceanside Golf & Country Club, opened in 1931 on both sides of Waukena Avenue at its intersection with Skillman.  The course had actually been in the works since 1929, mere months before the stock-market crash.  John Duncan Dunn designed it, and despite its proximity to the bay, there was only one water hole on the course, and its hazard was artificial.

"This new course is essentially inland in character," Trost described during an April 1931 tour.  "No back-breaking carries, no awe-inspiring water holes like ... at Lido.  But there'll be wind.  And coolness.  And trouble.  Depend upon that."

And so Oceanside set out on its quest -- one that proved fatal for many new clubs of the era -- to provide golf for its members while powering through the Depression, which would be followed soon after, of course, by World War II and the subsequent rush on land development.  The club hosted the 1938 Metropolitan PGA, and at least a few times bounced between public course and private facility.  Its original pro left after a decade to fight in the War, then immediately returned to his post after being wounded and serving four years overseas.  There were ownership changes and requisite mid-1940s chatter about home building on the site.  The layout had enough notoriety among Long Island courses that Pee Wee Reese and some Brooklyn Dodger teammates headed to Oceanside for a round after a 1950 rainout at Ebbets Field. 

Amazingly, despite the general turmoil of the day, there were some rumblings about constructing a new extension of the course closer to the bay.  Trost, two decades after his preview of Oceanside, reported in the Eagle that the new layout would go by the name Golfbay, to be designed by Alfred Tull. 

Meanwhile there were other more ominous rumblings regarding a threat that would ultimately take out Oceanside's neighbor in Baldwin, then part of Oceanside itself -- schools.  New neighborhoods require new schools, and the rise of post-WWII suburbs meant open season on open space.  By 1951 the Oceanside School District set its sights on the golf course and carried the support of local taxpayers.  The following year, Baldwin's Willowbrook Club (formerly Milburn) on Grand Avenue was bulldozed to make way for Baldwin High School, and Oceanside would soon lose the same fight.  Thirty-five acres of the course north of Waukena were lopped off, soon to become the grounds of Oceanside High.

Still, Oceanside trudged forward.  "Rather than throwing in the sponge when Oceanside High School takes its 35-acre bite," wrote Newsday's Bill Searby, "[the club] will continue to operate on a limited basis for the rest of [the 1952] season and plans to reopen as a better-than-ever country club in '53."

Gone were the first six holes (and about half its members to Engineers CC in Roslyn, per Newsday), but the club made use of its remaining 12, all while preparing to build southward over the expansive marshland that separated the course from the bay.  "The chore" of building on filled-in marsh "is a mountainous one," Searby wrote, but confidence in the revamped course -- to be called Middle Bay -- was high.  Trost returned in 1954 to give yet another preview during the course's grow-in phase.

"The new course ... will be rugged and strictly seaside," Trost wrote.  "The wind will be the dictator, really controlling par, yardage and the type of shots."  He concluded, "Altogether Middle Bay won't look a bit like Oceanside.  The name change is fitting."

Middle Bay, designed by Alfred Tull, opened in full as a private club in 1955.  Tull touched up the new holes over the first several seasons, making modifications as irrigation and saltwater spray required.  It remained private until 2012 when Sandy struck.

Golfers who play Middle Bay today often take note of the contrast between the open bayfront holes and the tighter, tree-lined fairways away from the water.  The latter, those parkland-style holes, are distant remnants of Oceanside, albeit altered over time.

Modifications and alterations continue at today's Middle Bay.  Each season since its post-Sandy rebirth, the course slowly brought back its driving range, added a cafe and installed new paths and bulkheads.  Earlier this year it leveled its 1960s-era clubhouse, and a new one is expected to open sometime in 2020.

[PICTURED -- TOP RIGHT: A newspaper sketch of the clubhouse prior to Oceanside's 1931 opening; MIDDLE RIGHT: Oceanside survived the tumultuous 1930s and sought new members, as seen in this 1941 Newsday ad; MIDDLE LEFT: A 1952 ad, not long before the course was partially consumed by Oceanside High; BOTTOM RIGHT: A present-day shot of The Golf Club at Middle Bay's signature par-3, looking over the water toward Point Lookout.]

OTHER POSTS IN THE "ORIGINS" SERIES:
Wind Watch Golf & Country Club -- May 2018

Street Names: The Ghosts of Long Island Golf's Past, Part 4 -- Sayville Golf Club

Street names can give clues about a community's past.  That's especially true with golf courses.  When Long Island streets are tagged with golf-related terms, it often means that buried beneath sidewalks and front lawns are the remains of a long-forgotten (or fondly remembered) course.

This series of posts will look back at courses that have been gone for decades, some close to a century, and whose presence is only marked by what developers scratched on road maps and signs.  To see other courses in the "Street Names: The Ghosts of Long Island Golf's Past" series, click the links at the bottom of the post.

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Like the previous entry in this street-name series, a relatively unknown course ill-prepared to pull its way through the Depression era left its mark on the local map with a Fairway Drive.  The only difference between the Valley Stream Country Club and this feature's Sayville Golf Club is that the Sayville neighborhood that replaced the golf grounds is left with two Fairways instead of one.

Sayville Golf Club debuted in 1903 during an era of course-building that served members of new and established country clubs as well as hotel guests and city dwellers.  Sayville was more of the latter -- it was one of several areas on Long Island's south shore known as a resort destination, and it would also develop into a popular community for summer residents from Brooklyn.  The course itself was built on a small parcel along Great South Bay, with nine holes covering around 30 acres along Candee Avenue. 

Previews included the type of exaggeration standard for the era.  "It is said that the turf comes as near to the typical Scotch soil as any to be found on Long Island," said a July 1903 write-up in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.  Charter members paid $10 for the season and non-members could play for 50 cents, according to the 2015 book Sayville and West Sayville: Pictured Through the Years.

It wasn't until July 1922 that a clubhouse was built on the property, offering the services of a country club in addition to golf.  Prior to that, a second course opened on a piece of farmland north of the original course on Montauk Highway and shared space with a tennis club.  Throughout the 1920s, the various clubs starred as lively social gathering spots serving well-known families from the local area and parts of the city.

But as the common story goes, the Depression set in and bent many of Long Island's less prominent clubs until they broke.  Sayville was sold in 1935 to a developer who planned a neighborhood of "Elizabethan and New England-style" homes, per the Eagle.  In the golf course's place sat about a half-dozen new residential roads, two of which -- Fairway Drive East and Fairway Drive West -- live on today sized and spaced like parallel par-4s.

SEE OTHER STREET-NAME POSTS:
Part 1: Cedar Point/Meadowlawn/Westwood -- North Woodmere
Part 2: The Lido Club -- Lido Beach
Part 3: Valley Stream Country Club -- Valley Stream

Newspaper images courtesy of Brooklyn Daily Eagle via Newspapers.com

Bethpage's Andrew Wilson chats about the 2019 PGA on "Around the Met" podcast

Bethpage State Park's director of agronomy Andrew Wilson joined A.J. Voelpel on the Metropolitan Golf Association's "Around the Met" podcast earlier this month to discuss the park and its preparation for next May's PGA Championship.

Wilson and Voelpel chatted about ideal winter conditions leading up to the event, which will tee off in May for the first time rather than its traditional August slot.  They also discussed recent tweaks to the Black Course, how the PGA will impact Bethpage's other courses and more about the crew's efforts around the park.  Listen to the podcast on SoundCloud at the Met Golf website.

Wilson has also contributed annual updates on conditions and park renovations here for Golf On Long Island.  For a refresher on changes and renovations made ahead of this past playing season, see Wilson's 2018 Bethpage update.

You can also view photos of ongoing renovations by visiting Wilson's and Bethpage Golf's Twitter pages at @Greensideup17 and @BethpageGolf.