SLOW PLAY: WHO’S REALLY AT FAULT?

While Many Complain About Slow Play, Southern California Resident Bill Yates Is Doing Something About It, and What He’s Doing is Raising Eyebrows.

You and your favorite golfing buddies are standing on the first tee. Two foursomes stand behind you anxiously waiting their turn on the tee. A booming voice comes over the loudspeaker and informs everyone within a two-mile radius that the group immediately in front of you has passed the magical 250-yard mark. "Hurry up – fire away," intones the disembodied voice, rushing all five groups on the first hole towards their inevitable reunion on the second tee, content that the first tee is "only 20 minutes behind today."

If this sounds familiar, you are probably a veteran of municipal golf’s "slow play" wars – agonizing waits between shots and six-hour rounds. Can anything be done? Bill Yates, co-author of the USGA’s Pace Manager System and the nation’s foremost authority on pace of play issues, says: "you bet."

A lifetime golfer, industrial engineer, and management consultant, Yates, who makes his home in Rolling Hills Estates, began applying his professional expertise to golf in 1992. That year, George Peper, editor of Golf Magazine, questioned whether the USGA ought to follow the wise lead of its new Slope Rating System, which measures the relative difficulty of golf courses, by creating a system that measures the relative times that it takes to play different golf courses.

The USGA took Peper up on his suggestion and assigned the task to Dean Knuth, the USGA’s Senior Director of Handicapping at the time. Knuth wrote a preliminary article for Golf Magazine about the initiative. Bill Yates read the article and immediately understood the connection between Peper’s suggestion and his own lifetime of professional activity. "The lights went on," as Yates is fond of putting it. He immediately contacted Knuth, whose background as a mathematician and statistician made the two of them professional soul mates. Yates and Knuth labored together to produce the "Pace Rating System," which analyzes the combined interaction of a particular golf course’s length, obstacles, and green to tee distances to determine how long it should take to play that course.

Since 1995 Yates has consulted for about 60 courses, including the venerable St. Andrews, and he has concluded that the biggest obstacle in winning the war against slow play is winning the war over the two biggest myths about slow play: 1) That all rounds should take four hours and 2) that players are the major cause of slow play. Taken together, "these two myths blind golf courses to the real causes of slow play and thus hamper their ability to develop effective solutions," says Yates.

According to Yates, "the myth of the four-hour round" sets expectations too high for golf course management teams and players. Over 98% of the courses that Yates has measured in the United States have Pace Ratings well above the four-hour mark. Revenue quotas and rounds-of-play quotas based on four-hour rounds force managers to overcrowd courses in order to fulfill their prescribed mandates. When this happens, players walk away from their experiences disgruntled, less due to the actual time it took to play the course than the fact that they had to wait on every hole. Yates is convinced that a combination of realistic expectations and an emphasis upon "flow of play" can optimize a golf course’s individual capabilities and thus optimize their customers’ experiences.

Yates is adamant about one thing in particular. Golfers bear little responsibility for most slow play! To prove his point to lay audiences Yates throws out the flow charts and timing analyses that his fellow industrial engineers are so fond of and uses an analogy that everyone can understand – bumper-to-bumper traffic on a Los Angeles freeway. Yates asks "does anyone believe that Los Angeles freeways are agonizingly slow at rush hour because of "slow drivers?" No! Everyone understands that there are simply more cars on the road than the system can handle. The same principle applies to golf courses. When expectations are unrealistic, i.e. that all groups can finish in four hours, golf courses do the math and put golfers out on the first tee in six or seven minute intervals. However, since it takes longer than that to traverse the course, it does not take long before the first tee "falls behind" and the course becomes clogged like an LA freeway at rush hour. All of the fast play tips, all the prodding, and all the nasty stares from marshals won’t help the situation any more than honking your horn at rush hour on the 405 freeway helps that situation.

If you are not yet convinced of Yates’ analysis, he asks a follow-up question: Why do all public golfers covet that immediately post-dawn tee time every Saturday and Sunday? Do they all enjoy the wet and cold conditions of the morning? Do they all have afternoon plans? Or could it be that a late morning tee time condemns them to an agonizingly slow round of golf. But why is that? Is there some conspiracy that brings slow players to every course in the country between 9 and 10 a.m. every weekend? Common sense tells you otherwise. Players who tee off early are playing on a course that has been empty for 10 hours. Players who tee off late are playing on a course that has been stuffing the first tee with more players than the course can accommodate. "The six minute tee interval makes it physically impossible for any golf course to have a decent pace of play no matter who plays your course," warns Yates.

If you are still not persuaded of Yates’ premise, he poses one final challenge: "Why do full field shotgun tournaments always take more than five hours?" Yates explains that the answer to that question lies in the purpose of a shotgun start, which is to "saturate" the course with players so that they will all complete play about the same time. So, the saturation of the course that normally takes about two hours of normal starting times takes 15 minutes in a shotgun tournament. Therefore, those five and one-half hour rounds that are usually reserved for the groups starting after 9:30 a.m. are now made available to every one in the field, no matter what time of day they begin. Waiting to play every shot is instantly built into every hole on the course.

All right, so Yates has a unique perspective on the slow play problem, but what are his solutions?

Courses should contact their regional / state USGA affiliated golf association and ask to have a Pace Rating performed for their course.

Courses and players should think of their relationship in terms of a contract – the course agrees to operate the facility in a manner that guarantees that full-paying customers finish their rounds and golfers agree to have the their group’s first ball in the air at their appointed starting time.

Courses should determine the optimum-starting interval, one that promotes the most efficient "flow of play," and aggressively manage and marshal the course to that interval.

Courses should never "squeeze in" groups by using "starter’s times."

Courses should have starters greet players on the first tee, explain the course’s pace of play policies, and start them right on time.

Courses should cajole players to play from the proper tees for their games.

Courses should give rangers the tools and information necessary to monitor the pace and flow of all groups on the golf course. With proper tee intervals, ones that get players off at their appointed times and maintain a steady flow on the course, rangers can know exactly where each group should be at any time during the day. With six or seven minute tee intervals, chaos reigns, and no one knows or cares where each group ought to be at any given time.

Courses should focus on golf’s finish line. Courses should count rounds of play not as the number of green fees they have rung through the register on a given day but rather as the number of players who actually complete their rounds of golf on a given day. This is the way customers count "rounds."

Courses should be set up so that rough and green speed do not unnecessarily slow play.

Golfers should relax, enjoy the game, and play ready golf.

By this point, every veteran of municipal golf’s "slow play" wars has probably concluded that Yates’ novel ideas might be suited to upscale daily fee courses, but they really don’t apply to municipal courses. After all, don’t greater tee intervals equal fewer players, which equals less revenue and main mission unaccomplished? Yates agrees that every intuitive sense indicates that this is the case, but Yates adds that often with industrial flow analyses the intuitive is flat wrong.

Ann Weaver, who is the City of Sacramento’s Golf Manager, would agree. When Weaver took the Sacramento job in 1995 she encountered the standard municipal situation – six-minute tee intervals, overcrowding, and customer dissatisfaction. She brought Bill Yates in for a formal consultation, a three-day process in which Yates surveys the problem, makes specific recommendations, and trains the management staff in his techniques. Because Yates’ ideas are counterintuitive, Weaver did not believe that she could sell his prescriptions politically. City Fathers feared that the Six-course system would lose revenue. So she sold them on using the City’s Arcade Creek Golf Course as a pilot project. Weaver put in eight-minute tee intervals, redesigned a few tees, and instructed the marshals to follow Yates’ recommendations. The result? Weaver and the golfers of Sacramento were sold. Today, all six of Sacramento’s municipal courses employ eight-minute tee intervals, and all six courses approach slow play problems from the perspective that it stems from bad management rather than naughty golfers. "The greater tee intervals led to shorter rounds of golf, greater numbers of golfers playing rounds of golf, greatly increased customer satisfaction, and greater revenues in the long run," says Weaver.

Steve Duron, Golf Operations Administrator for the County of Los Angeles, which owns the largest publicly held system in the nation, has not consulted with Yates, but he has spoken with enough disgruntled golfers to openly encourage some of LA County’s golf concessionaires to implement a version of Yates’ prescriptions. "It wouldn’t be a bad idea if one of our course operators were to experiment with nine-minute tee intervals and the elimination of fivesomes for a six-month period," says Duron. "That way we could definitively determine the impacts upon revenue and customer satisfaction."

Everyone has probably heard the old saw about the definition of foolishness: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Every weekend at municipal courses throughout Southern California, courses keep doing the same thing over and over again and somehow hoping that things will work out. The City of Sacramento broke that cycle and succeeded. With any luck, there just might be a few more bold municipal golf managers like Ann Weaver in our midst with the courage to try something different, and there might be a few innovative golf management companies with the foresight to take up Steve Duron’s challenge.