Don’t Rush That Swing: A Few Easy Tips for Improving Our Game at Rye Golf Club

Rye City Councilman and candidate for City Mayor Joe Sack submitted the following guest column to Rye Patch on July 11, 2013.

When it comes to Rye Golf Club these days, new ideas keep raining down from all different directions and angles, like golf balls on a driving range.  These ideas run the gamut from breaking up the club’s golf and pool operations, to hiring an outside management company for all or parts of the club, to handing over the club operations to a non-profit organization.  Some of these ideas are quite drastic, some involve welcome creative thinking, some might even eventually be adopted as part of the solution.  Or not.

But it is a very good thing that we have started the conversation.

It would, however, be a very bad thing for us to make any hasty decisions.

We ought to do our due diligence on these ideas.  We ought to vet them.  We ought to carefully and considerately outline the pros and the cons.  We ought to determine unintended consequences.  The temporary Rye Golf Club Strategic Committee members have done an excellent job at all this, and they will need all necessary time to keep up the good work.

We ought to gather more information – a lot more.  We are just a few months removed from uncovering a 7-year, million dollar plus fraud.  We also obviously don’t have the financial results yet for the 2013 season, which we will absolutely need before we make any major club altering decisions.  Quite frankly, we are also unfortunately lacking when it comes to extracting performance data from past years, due to separate income and expense accounting systems which were apparently employed by city and club management.  The members of the newly re-invigorated Rye Golf Club Finance Committee are making solid headway in drilling down on the numbers, and we will need them to stay on top of the situation.

We ought to give the club a chance to operate for a full year while not reeling from the fallout of the recent fraud.  And this ought to be done with a full-time professional club manager overseeing things at the helm.  The makeshift management structure employed at the club this year has not been optimum.  The members of the Rye Golf Club Commission have applied themselves admirably to many of the operational issues that have cropped up, and their unique perspective as actual users of the facility have been invaluable.  And certainly, it only makes sense going forward to give the members a greater say.  But in order to establish a fair baseline, it seems reasonable that we experience a full and uninhibited year of normal business in 2014 in order to make any meaningful comparisons against potential long-term management alternatives.

We ought to communicate with the golf club membership, as well as with the voters and taxpayers of Rye, and build a consensus around what options we might eventually pursue.  There is an election this summer for at least three new members of the Golf Commission.  And in the fall, a significant majority of the entire City Council will turn over, which may mean different directions in how the city government itself is run, let alone Rye Golf Club.  These issues looking into the future will undoubtedly be front and center in the election debates.  The winners in these elections will arguably have the mandate to be the authoritative voice and decision makers on these important long-term issues.

The Rye Golf Club has been serving Rye for almost 50 years.  If we take our time, we can continue to move steadily forward.  If we rush things, and make drastic structural changes prematurely, and without even having a basis to know whether these drastic changes are desirable, there is a big downside.  As we start this new round, let’s get it right on the first tee box.