With golf courses closing up shop at an alarming rate, Monday’s news that plans to redevelop the former South Weymouth Naval Air Station will include a new track was not exactly cause for celebration.
The U.S. Navy was expected to seal a deal with the South Shore Tri-Town Development Corp. on Tuesday and close next month on construction of some 3,000 homes, retail and office space, a sports and recreation business, and a golf course, according to the Associated Press. The Navy was to sell property remaining for $25 million, after more than 10 years of discussions about what to do with the 1,400-acre site that closed in 1997 due to Pentagon closures of military bases.
The AP report noted that the $2.5 billion development project promised to create about 10,000 permanent and temporary construction jobs over the next 10 years, which would be terrific. But a golf course? The timing could not be worse for such an undertaking, coming less than a week after TD Bank announced plans to sell the Hawthorne Country Club in North Dartmouth, Mass., in a foreclosure auction, and developers said they would convert part of Rowley’s Carriage Pines Golf Course into a residential community, according to the Boston Business Journal.
The number of Massachusetts golf courses falling victim to the sour economy just keeps growing, with Acton’s Quail Ridge CC and the Ridge Club in Sandwich just two of the more recent casualties. New owners hope to bail Lakeville CC out of the hazard of its previous owner’s deep debt, Wentworth Hills GC recently reopened after its troubles, and the woes of Sterling National CC the former Georgetown CC (now Black Swan CC) and Pleasant Valley CC are well-chronicled.
“We’re at a low point right now,” Mark O’Neill, president of the Essex Golf Group, a brokerage and turnaround consultancy for New England-based courses, told BBJ. “And it’s across the board.”
As play continues to drop (rounds in New England were down 7.7 percent in September from a year ago, according to the National Golf Foundation) and course closures outpace openings, just what Boston does not need is another golf course adding to the glut of new operations that opened in the last 10 years or so. Indeed, O’Neill said some 25 million players have quit playing since the recession began and he believed that number would continue to grow.
“The industry needs a purge,” he told BBJ. “Some of these courses just need to go away.”
Or, in the case of the new fairways and greens planned for the site of the old naval base, not open in the first place.
(Emily Kay is a regular contributor to New England Golf Monthly. Check her out on the The A Position, Waggle Room, Boston Golf Examiner, National Golf Examiner, and GottaGoGolf websites. You may also follow Kay on Twitter @golfexaminer.)
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