INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — The busy season at Sandridge Golf Club isn’t like a baseball season: There are no make-up dates, and rainouts can’t be rescheduled.
When the weather is bad, you simply play fewer games.
So while Sandridge’s tee times were filled and its two county-owned courses were jam-packed throughout a warm, dry February – a trend that continued into March – it did nothing to make up for the rounds of golf lost to rain, morning frost and cold temperatures in January.
“We did normal for February, which is good,” Sandridge Golf Director Bela Nagy said. “I like normal. If things stay normal, that’d be great. But we were down about 2,500 rounds in January, because we had a very rainy, cold month, and you can’t get those rounds back.
“You can’t overcome a bad January with a great February, or even a great March,” he added. “There are only so many days and so many tee times. Once you lose them, they’re gone.”
Wet weather, in fact, contributed mightily to Sandridge’s two 18-hole courses – The Lakes and The Dunes – being down a combined 4,000 rounds for the 2017-18 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1.
Nagy said Vero Beach received 48 inches of rain from Sept. 10 through Dec. 31, followed by an unusually wet, cold January that produced several mornings when frost covered the courses.
“I run the Florida Municipal Golf Course Association, and everyone is down rounds for the same period this year,” Nagy said. “We had a rough January – down 11 percent – but part of the reason we were down was because January 2017 was excellent . . . with no frost, no rain, no bad weather at all.”
February and March are Sandridge’s busiest months, Nagy said, adding that on a “normal day” last month more than 500 rounds were played on county-operated courses.
The capacity crowds have become typical at Sandridge during Vero Beach’s busy season.
“We can’t get any more than that,” Nagy said. “Our tee times are booked, and most days we’re busy until 2:30 in the afternoon. That’s our normal, and that’s good.
Nagy said Sandridge takes in 60 percent of its annual revenues in the 12 weeks from early January through the end of March. The other nine months, the number of daily rounds drops to an average of about 200, and that’s on a weekend day.
(For those who don’t know: During the busy season, weekdays are busier than weekends. The rest of the year, the opposite is true.)
Nagy, who has been teaching golf at Sandridge for more than 20 years, said the number of rounds played mirrors the seasonal traffic on local roadways. Rounds start to drop in April and decline further in May.
“From May through September, the numbers decrease each month,” Nagy explained. “Then October comes around and you start to see things picking up again through Thanksgiving. There’s a little lull around Christmas, and then around Jan. 10, things amp up and stay that way until the end of March.
“It’s been that way for a long time, so we’re really busy right now, which is great, because we’ve got to get it while we can.”
Sandridge relies on outside groups – from communities such as Sea Oaks and Grove Isle – and club-organized leagues to help fill its tee times throughout the week.
Those groups and leagues reserve blocks of tee times on certain days, Nagy said, and they occupy about 40 percent of the club’s rounds.
“We rely a lot on those guys,” he said. “My job is to fill the golf course, and it’s nice to have the tee sheet almost half-filled before we put it out. And there are still plenty of times available for others.”
The crowded tee sheet, however, also produces a crowded golf course. Nagy said foursomes tee off at eight-minute intervals until noon, when the intervals are expanded to nine minutes, if all goes as planned. But a crowded course often produces slow play, which can back things up.
On a good day, Nagy said, a round on The Dunes course takes four hours and 20 minutes to complete. That number drops to four hours and seven minutes on The Lakes course, which is shorter.
“Sometimes, especially this time of year, it can creep up to the five-hour mark,” Nagy said. “We could space things out by going every nine minutes, but if we did that, we’d lose about eight foursomes a day. That’s 32 fewer people who can get on the golf course.
“People gripe about the slow pace of play, but if we went to nine-minute intervals, we’d have people griping that they can’t get a tee time,” he added. “You’ve got to find a balance.”
Might the county eventually expand the facility and add a third course?
Nagy said he has made such inquiries to county officials, only to be rebuffed. He tried to convince them to buy Hawk’s Nest before it was acquired by The Moorings. He also suggested they look at the 200 acres to Sandridge’s immediate east.
There’s not enough room to build another course on the club’s existing property, he said.
“I’m always looking for ways to expand and improve the facilities,” Nagy said of Sandridge, which opened with one course in 1987 and currently employs 35 workers, three of them on a full-time basis. “The county has given it some thought, but it would be very hard to justify, even though we generate the revenues we need to cover our operations and expenses.
“If there were a third course, I probably could fill it up, but only for those three months during the season,” he added. “The other 40 weeks? No way.”
The 18-hole rates at Sandridge range from a low of $24 during the offseason to a high of $50 during the busy season. And get this: They haven’t been raised in 14 years.
“I would love to raise them,” Nagy said. “I’d love to put a few less golfers out there and charge a little more. We could speed up play, reduce the wear-and-tear on both the golf courses and the carts, and still maintain our revenues.”
Nagy said the County Commission would have to approve any increase in fees. So far, they have not seen the need.
“We’ve always been set up to break even,” he added, “and we’ve been able to make things work the last five or six years, making do with what we have, redirecting money and putting it back into the facility.”
