Where do you play (public vs private)?

[BostonSal]

27 minutes ago, RickK said:

Sure, there are going to be politics to deal with but once you join a club, you have to realize you have a vested interest in it and you must get in there and become involved in the Men's Golf Association or the Senior Men's Golf Association, sign up for the tournaments or play days.  Get involved.  Then you realize the benefits of being a club member.  

RickK shows us a great example of how club memberships can differ.  There's virtually no politics at our club because you're not investing in anything.  It's like belonging to a gym. You pay your dues and you do pretty much what you want. 

You don't have any equity in anything.  You have no assessments.  No huge initiation investments. Nobody asks your opinion about club rules.  If you like it, you come back, and if you don't, you find a similar corporate owned club which will be all too glad to take you.  There are adds on for which you pay individually like bag room service. It's almost like having a season pass at a public course except you have all the private club amenities and your guests are completely on your tab.

I have a senior weekday membership which means that I have access to all the club facilities all the time except the golf course which is limited to weekdays.  This late in the season, even that isn't strictly enforced.

And on weekdays, you can reserve tee times, but you can usually just walk on.  

This is the perfect type of situation for me.  We have locally any number of totally different member equity clubs, where you need to be sponsored to get on the waiting list, and when your name comes up, there's a membership committee to say, well, maybe not.  You pay a substantial initiation fee.  You're liable to assessments as they become required.  Member committees rather than hired professionals run pretty much everything. You go to emergency meetings and vote on things.  Traditional dues might actually be a little less is one saving grace.  But everything the traditional private club member expects and has learned how to live with is everything that would drive me out of golf.   

But in this day and age, there are alternatives if you look for them.   Unfortunately, some public courses are closing down.  There are definitely fewer than there were twenty-five years ago, and they're almost all privately owned.  The venerable George Wright is going strong, but for the most part, the muni courses are non-existent in this area. At least I don't know of many.

One poster claims the South Shore near Rhode Island is different.  Maybe so.  If I'm leaving the city in a car and not a plane, I'm definitely heading North, not South.  I don't even go south for Patriots games at Foxborough.  

[revkev]

On 9/14/2021 at 11:22 AM, russtopherb said:

As someone living in MA right near RI, I can say that while thinking golf up here is becoming "elitist" might be a nifty thing to say, it's simply not true. There are far, far more munis and semi-privates with a wide range of public tee times than there are private clubs. I have never had a problem getting a tee time at any number of courses if I wanted to play. If one course was booked, I simply found another within the same distance. And this includes heading out towards Cape Cod.

That's great to hear.  I lived in Fairfield County which was another animal altogether.  Land was too valuable - there was one course in my town and it was private - I had to driver 30 minutes to get to the muni in Bridgeport, Fairfield or Norwalk and all were crowded as at the time they were the only public tracks in those towns - the one in Bridgeport had 36 holes but that was the extent of public golf in a city of 200 K residents.

 

I had no issues finding reasonable places to play when I lived on Cape Cod and Eastern Connecticut, just after getting married.