On course to a brighter future

As Jon Whittemore drove along one of the fairways of the Legacy Golf Club at Lakewood Ranch, he noticed that somebody had used that particular spot as a personal driving range, perhaps by sneaking on just before darkness.

Whittemore pulled up his golf cart and dug into a bucket that contained a mixture of dirt, fertilizer and grass seed used to repair divots. He started filling the craters one by one, until about eight holes were filled.

The day before, Whittemore borrowed an F150 pickup and collected some dryers from the appliance store. He delivered them, and hooked them up at the golf course, his bashed knuckles proving that the process involved a bit of aggravation.

If Whittemore was a golf course superintendent, his actions wouldn't raise an eyebrow.

But he owns the place. He could easily instruct someone else to handle those types of chores.

Over the past six years, Legacy has had four owners and Whittemore and his Legacy Golf Holdings, LLC., partners are the most recent, buying the club for $3.4 million on Nov. 4. According to Whittemore, the rash of sales is over.

"This is my home," said Whittemore, a Lakewood Ranch resident. "There is an element of pride that goes into owning your hometown golf course that I can't even find the words to describe."

That pride causes Whittemore to take a hands-on role when it comes to bringing the course back to pristine condition.

"The point is that there is a direct involvement," Whittemore said. "You want to inspire your team on site."

Although the new team has been around just a month, it appears to be making a difference. Lakewood Ranch resident Chris Drikakis has played on the Arnold Palmer-designed course for the past six years. 

"What's better?" Drikakis asked rhetorically about the difference between past ownership and the new owners. "They've over-seeded the greens, and they are mowing, and rolling the greens, and using fertilizer, and the workers are nice and restrooms are clean."

Drikakis could have kept going on.

"You noticed (the new owners') attention to detail right away," Drikakis said. "I could play elsewhere, and I'm not."

Whittemore said ownership on site makes all the difference.

"It's the difference between a property being overlooked," he said. "I can touch it, feel it on a daily basis."

Still, can the new ownership team expect to be successful with a course that other owners keep abandoning?

"You can be doom and gloom about any industry," Whittemore said. "Our passion makes us confident that we can take a property and move it in the right direction."

Venice resident Kevin Paschall is a managing partner in the course and he said previous owners just weren't the right fit for keeping the property on a long-term basis.

"The course was sold three times in the last 18 months, but that is not scary for us," Paschall said. "We know what we are getting into. ClubCorps, it didn't fit their portfolio. They have mostly private clubs.

"Some companies, if they can chop it and flip it, that's what they are going to do. We're local. We're not flipping."

 Whittemore worked for Arnold Palmer Golf Management when he followed the lead of fellow executive Larry Galloway to break away and form their own ownership group.

They bought Sarasota courses Serenoa (in 2009) and Rolling Green (in 2010).

Now Whittemore and Galloway have added Legacy.

"We fell in love with this market," said Galloway, who Whittemore calls the "sensei" of the ownership group. "Certain markets lend themselves to success. We stay away from 95% of them.

"You look for rate tolerance. Kansas City has the best golf courses in the United States, period. But they are charging $29 to play a round. The cost of operating a course is about the same whether you are in Kansas City, St. Louis or Sarasota."

Once a course is secured, Galloway said they have to build loyalty.

Galloway said the first reason Legacy will be financially successful is because his group has gone to an "all-inclusive" strategy.

"The price of golf includes breakfast, lunch and a couple of drinks," said Galloway, who works from Austin, Texas. "We're going to spend $100,000 in the next year giving away free food and beer. But we are going to sell $400,000 more golf.

"The last thing a lot of owners want to do is give everyone lunch and beer when they aren't doing that well. But we're not in the restaurant business so we aren't trying to make any money on food. We are in the tee time business."

On Jan. 1, Legacy will begin a Practice, Learn and Play program that costs $35.95 a month and includes all the range balls a golfer wants to hit, access to golf in the afternoons for the price of a cart fee (when space is available), complimentary clinics twice a week, special merchandise deals and a handicap.

"This is intended to lower the barriers into the game," Whittemore said.

Some of the barriers that kept golfers away from Legacy had to do with course condition.

"There had been some neglect in certain areas," Whittemore said. "It meant bringing in John Ward to be the golf course superintendent."

Ward, who has 40 years of golf course maintenance, had brought other properties back to pristine condition for Whittemore.

"It has great bones," Ward said of the course. "It's just been neglected. There had been no improvements and they were just maintaining the status quo. If you ask the members now, they would tell you they could see improvements in weeks."

Whittemore talked about bringing in a "groomer" for the course's waste bunkers. "It turns over the bunker material and makes it more playable for the high handicapper," Whittemore said. "Another example would be the towels on the ball washers. They hadn't been changed for 12 to 15 months. That was a quick and easy fix.

"Generally, we are creating a culture where details matter."

He reiterated that Legacy Golf Club will be a different place because he intends to be around a long time.

"It's our passion," Whittemore said about running a golf club. "We love the game from sun up to sun down."

He said one of the course's biggest challenges is to introduce young players to the game.

"Kids programming," he said when asked about one of his priorities. "Soccer does a good job cultivating young players. As football gets less popular, who will capture the next athletes? We need to be better and more dynamic with our outreach programs."

If he can draw people to Legacy for the first time, he believes the rest will take care of itself.

"We've inherited a lot of good employees and they have gravitated to the new energy," he said. "And, gosh, I could play this course every single day and it's always going to be a little different."

"The layout is phenomenal," Paschall said. "Every hole is different and it is spread out over 200 acres. It's not like you just are going back and forth. You go through oaks, alongside water, past waste bunkers. We have six sets of tees for all different levels.

"I just feel fortunate to be part of what this is. People are amazed by what this golf course is. I think before they were trying to live on name alone."