25 Years….
On this day 25 years ago, Big Will celebrated his 52nd birthday and Southers Marsh opened for the first time. Sixty four lucky players were fortunate enough to find us and play that day as we tried to figure out what we were doing. At 9 PM the night before we cracked open the cash register box and tried to set it up.
“Step 1 – Plug in the register”
Ok, we can do this
“Step 2 – Input your PLU numbers”
We’re in a lot of trouble here
Two weeks prior to opening day – the morning of Sarah’s and my wedding – Big Will hit the ceremonial first tee shot as we played the course for the very first time. In my mind I was thinking that his shot would be an omen for how the experience of running the golf course would go. He laced a line drive from the back tee box that shattered the window of the pumphouse by the middle tee box. It was shockingly appropriate for how the first few years were going to go.
When we first opened there was only tar from the street to the first level of the parking lot and the rest of the parking lot was sand. We were out of money and the course was only almost done. For that first season we were closed on Mondays because we needed the extra day without golfers to finish up a laundry list of projects that still needed completion. We were cart path only since the grass was so new it couldn’t handle the golf cart traffic. None of us had any experience running a golf course and we were learning on the fly. It was total chaos.
Mike Pruett was here on the first day of construction when we poured the slab for the golf course pump house and still mows 6 days a week from “Pru-thirty” until 8 or 9 AM. Ted Flynn spent the summer of construction in a loader screening greens mix on site and loading dump trucks. He married my sister Laura and has since become the head mechanic at the Kittansett Club but still helps maintain our equipment and grind our reels. JD Marks joined us the next spring and had actual golf experience having worked on the grounds crew at North Hill the previous summer. Today JD is part of the leadership of Southers Marsh and is married to my younger sister Betsy. Ryan Gantz made the mistake of jogging through the course construction one day and became our erosion control specialist, first chef in the clubhouse, and built our first website. Brian Leverone and Shawn McGillveary were high school kids who transitioned from working on the bog to helping build the golf course. It was Lev who first asked the question that we still ask all the time, “How would they do this on a real golf course?” They brought in their friend Greg King who spent the summer trenching in a mini-excavator, a job he thought was really fun for the first 2 days of the 100 or so that he worked. We later added Jack Donahue because we realized we didn’t have enough people to build a course and take care of the parts of the course that were already planted. Rob Bechtold and Mike Costa were just 2 little kids who would wander over from the neighborhood and help out with manual labor. Looking back on it, I honestly can’t believe we made it. It’s reasonable to think that you could build a golf course in a summer with your neighbor, your daughter’s boyfriend, and a handful of high school kids, right?
None of this would have been possible if it weren’t for Dahn Tibbett who shaped the tees, bunkers, and greens and brought in his crew to help finish grade and seed. In March of 2000, Big Will and I sat in his kitchen and he said, “If I’m hearing you correctly, you want me to help you build a golf course but you have no experience and no money. Ok, sounds like fun, I’m in!”
If I had the knowledge 26 years ago when we hatched this plan that I have now, Southers Marsh wouldn’t exist. Ignorance was our savior. We didn’t know how far over our heads we were in so we just battled one day at a time. And unbelievably, we are still here 25 years later. Thank you to everyone who has played Southers Marsh. Thank you to our current staff of 85 and all of our former employees, with a special shout out to Mike Duffy, our chef for 15 years, and Tanya Bellew our clubhouse manager, who have worked and volunteered their time to make Southers Marsh the fun and special place it is. Thank you to all our family members who are supportive while we work an unreasonable number of hours. And finally, a very special thank you to my mother, Nancy, who put up with my father’s great ideas and his flair for the dramatic.
Thank you,
Willie
