Lucky few dial in top tee times for Bergen courses.
Ever wonder why it's so hard to score a weekend-morning
tee time at a public golf course in Bergen County? Take a look at your
competition:
Bob sits on his couch with his home phone in one hand and
cellphone in the other and begins hitting the redial buttons at exactly 7
p.m. on a Sunday night.
His wife and their teenage daughter also have cellphones,
and they dial the same number -- again and again.
The Fort Lee family gets nothing but busy signals for the
first 20 calls. But Bob finally gets through, and secures a tee time for a
group the following Sunday morning at the county-owned Overpeck Golf Course.
It's 7:03; by 7:05, all the available morning tee times
are gone.
Bob is one of a small but devout group of golfers who
routinely grab the lion's share of coveted tee times at Bergen County's five
publicly owned courses.
They know how to play within the rules to make the
county's week-ahead telephone reservation system work in their favor. They
know how to increase their odds in the intense competition with thousands of
other busy suburbanites for a tee time that allows them to play 18 holes and
still have most of a weekend afternoon left for family obligations or
chores.
Successful strategy
The numbers help tell the story. The Record obtained
databases listing all those who played rounds reserved though Bergen's
telephone system in 2006. Our analysis shows that of more than 21,000 duly
registered golfers, fewer than 3 percent snagged close to half of the
weekend starting times available through the reservation system.
This core group of about 550 played anywhere from 10 to 52
times on weekend mornings using reserved tee times.
The system, which makes slots available starting at 7 p.m.
seven days in advance, is the overwhelming choice of weekend-morning
golfers. It allows them to avoid the long waits that prevail at courses that
rely on a walk-on setup, like Passaic County.
With his strategy, Bob was successful 25 times, reserving
weekend-morning spots for himself and 52 playing partners last year. Others
are even better: the quickest dialing finger in the county hit pay dirt 45
times.
Call them Bergen's golf "phonatics."
Supply vs. demand
There's no way of knowing how many others holding a county
golf card tried and had their hopes crushed by a repeated busy signal. It's
safe to say there were hundreds, possibly thousands.
The real problem, says Kevin Purcell, the county's general
manager of golf courses, is a simple issue of supply and demand -- too many
golfers and too few holes.
A study generated several years ago by the National Golf
Foundation and a golf consultant indicated that if Bergen County could added
five public courses the demand still would not be satisfied. The addition
last year of a fifth course -- the more expensive Valley Brook in River Vale
-- didn't put much of a dent in the equation.
"And they want to be able to play between eight and 10 in
the morning, which is even difficult to do on a private course in the
county," Purcell said.
"We're still facing the issue of having a tremendous
amount of golfers with a small amount of tee times."
System defended
Adding to the problem, though, is a reservation system
that rewards those who can make it work for them, usually by flooding the
system with calls during a five-minute span.
Often, that's not possible for many of Bergen's golfers,
whose interest in the game may be just as intense, but who don't have the
time or the freedom to plan a round a week in advance.
"I tried calling a couple of times, but it was a very,
very hard time," Sang Jin said one Saturday morning shortly before teeing
off as a walk-on at Overpeck, in Teaneck. "I work and I don't have much time
to make a reservation."
Purcell defends the system as fair, saying that it gives
everybody an equal shot.
"We're not surprised that there's a core group of really
hard-core golfers that work very hard to get those tee times," he said.
"They dedicated themselves on a Saturday and Sunday evening to get the tee
times and be ready at 7 to make the call."
Della Carroll, Bergen County's golf management specialist,
said 213,829 rounds were played last year at Bergen's five county-run
courses: Rockleigh, Overpeck and Valley Brook, as well as Darlington in
Mahwah and Orchard Hills in Paramus.
Nearly half of those were walk-ons, but they played mostly
at times other than weekend mornings.
For those wanting to reserve a weekend tee time, repeated
busy signals are the rule. The county hired a company to monitor calls made
to the system last year and, on Sunday, Sept. 3 between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m.,
Purcell said, 19,307 calls were made and 18,632 received a busy signal. That
was a 96.5 percent failure rate, or better than 24 out of every 25 calls.
Some give up altogether. But there are alternatives, both
within the Bergen County system and elsewhere.
Pricey alternatives
Even on weekend mornings, a foursome of walk-ons is
allowed to go off every hour at each of the five courses. But the
competition for those spots is pretty intense, too. Hundreds will arrive
before dawn and place their name on the standby list and hope to tee off
before noon.
That's how Sang Jin got to play this month.
Others go elsewhere, either to one of the privately owned,
open-to-the-public courses in Bergen County, or elsewhere in the state.
Many travel to Sussex County, where there are more than a
dozen public courses, including six run by Crystal Springs Resort.
"There are more residents of Bergen County playing here
than there are Sussex residents," said Art Walton, vice president of golf
operations for Crystal Springs.
Walton estimates that about 8,000 to 9,000 Bergen
residents visit the company's courses annually -- about 18 percent to 19
percent of their total clientele.
But the Bergen exiles pay a premium to play there. A
weekend-morning round at Crystal Springs' courses runs from $82 to $140,
compared with $35 to play at most of the county-owned courses in Bergen.
(It's $52 at Valley Brook including, as with the others, half the cost of a
golf cart.)
Still, most veterans would agree that playing at a public
course in Bergen County is much better than it was 15 years ago, when tee
times were first-come, first-served. Golfers would arrive at the courses
several hours before dawn to secure an early-morning time.
"You'd have to get there in the middle of the night," said
Don, of Hillsdale, a county-course regular for many years. "You almost had
to call the police to determine who was where in line."
Today, the competition in Bergen is still intense, though
less contentious. If a golfer calls on Saturday at 7 p.m. to reserve a tee
time for the following Saturday, and doesn't get through until 7:05 p.m.,
odds are that all the morning tee times are already filled, Purcell and
Carroll said. Callers can reserve one tee time, for one to four players.
The county plans next year to allow golfers to make
reservations online, Purcell said. Available slots will be listed so golfers
can better target a specific tee time.
Some golfers work the current telephone system in packs.
Each member of a foursome, for instance, will try to make a tee-time
reservation; the group will then keep the best option and cancel the others.
County officials acknowledge the system allows reservers
to choreograph a cancellation so that a friend can grab it moments later.
Under the county system, reservations can be canceled up
to 10 p.m. the night before without penalty. Purcell said the county is
considering changing the cancellation deadline to more than a day in
advance.
"If you don't have a tee time, sometimes what you'll do is
call the day before after 9 o'clock, because people dump it at the last
minute," Bob said. "It's almost like at five minutes to 10 or 10 o'clock,
it's like calling at 7 p.m. the week before because the phones are busy,
because people are calling to see who dumped a single or a twosome."
Safeguards in place
Meanwhile, the county has made several moves the past year
to defeat tee-time and course cheaters.
About 100 golfers a year are caught using someone else's
card, and Purcell said the courses have become "much more diligent in
policing the tee-time holders."
Golfers whose cards are confiscated must endure the walk
of shame by coming to the golf administration office in Hackensack to
retrieve it.
First-time offenders are given a warning. Two-timers
forfeit privileges for the remainder of the season.
In addition, the tee-time system is turned off each night
shortly before 7 p.m., Purcell said, to prevent people from calling before
the deadline.
"We needed to make sure that these people didn't have any
kind of advantage in getting into the system, and we made sure that doesn't
happen," he said. "There's no back-door way into the system."
Link to Original Record article
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