The secret to the Practice Tee Driving Range & Golf Learning Center’s success is that customers don’t feel like customers. They feel more like guests in Lynn and Martha Hayungses’ home. And that idea is truer than many of them will ever know.

The Hayungses broke into the golf range business about a year ago, and what they didn’t know about golf or running a practice range, they simply made up for in sheer comfort for their customers. The clubhouse is more like a friendly neighbor’s living room, and the tee line is a comfortable back yard with seating for practice players, family and friends. Drinks are delivered from the clubhouse to the tee line, and on Friday nights, everyone enjoys Lynn’s barbecue hot out of the grilling pit. All in all, that convivial atmosphere and the Practice Tee’s smashing success out of the gates makes the sparkling facility Golf Range Times’ 2004 Best New Range Award winner.

“I told my wife when we were building it, I know how many hours a day you and I are going to spend here, so I’m going to make it comfortable,” says Lynn, who owns the Pharr, Texas, golf center with his wife, Martha, the facility’s general manager.
Lynn knew what he wanted in a prime practice facility because his youngest sons, Kyle and Dustin, became avid golfers a couple of years ago and Lynn would drive them to the Practice Tee, a former local range in Mission, a neighboring town. Spending time on the tee line gave Lynn some firm ideas of what he liked and didn’t like about the facility, and when he and his wife were looking for an investment, range ownership popped in his head.

Around the same time, the owner of the Practice Tee lost his land lease, so the Hayungses bought the range’s name—along with much of its equipment—and reopened a newer, grander practice center on another site while retaining the local name recognition.

Timing Is Everything
The Hayungses’ sojourn into the golf range industry was a serendipitous convergence of timing and opportunity. Dustin, the youngest of the four Hayungs sons, is a high school sophomore who plays on the South Texas Junior PGA circuit and also has been a varsity starter for the high school team since his freshman year.
Dustin’s success in the sport prompted his parents’ interest in finding quality practice facilities for him, and that was the genesis of the new Practice Tee. Married for 26 years, the Hayungses were interested in opening their own business, and when Martha successfully battled back from a long illness, she was ready to jump back into the workforce.

“She said she wanted to go to work but only if we could do something on our own,” says Lynn, who continues to work for a family-affiliated rental railcar leasing business, Texas Railcar Leasing Co. “Then once we made the decision to go ahead with this, the biggest drawback was trying to find the right property.”

Lynn was dead set against leasing land. “To me, the money in this business is in selling the property down the road,” he says. “So the problem was finding a piece of property in a good area that I thought would get enough business to support it and make it work.”

Lynn ultimately found his spot, right in the middle of town and in one of the nation’s fastest growing areas. In the three-city sprawl of Pharr, McAllen and Edinburg, near the bottom of Texas, the population has grown in the past three years from 150,000 to almost 250,000, according to Lynn. The Practice Tee sits on busy West Nolana Loop, a major thoroughfare that connects the three cities and lends high visibility to the facility there on the north side.

“We’re on the good side of town, the one that’s growing,” says Lynn with a laugh. “I couldn’t have found a better location. I was lucky.”

The Hayungses bought 26 acres of a 35-acre tract from an absentee owner and invested “a little over a million dollars” into the range, more than half that in acquiring the land.

“With the way the area is growing, I paid a little less than 50 cents a square foot,” says Lynn. “And another five to seven years down the road, I’m going to have a 26-acre tract that ought to be worth three or four bucks a square foot, I think. And that’s where the [investment] really makes money.”

The Hayungses are eying that five- to seven-year window to own the business and then sell the land, and it’s already paying dividends for them. Not only do they work at the facility with their children, sharing that experience, but their concept for an upscale, golf-only facility is a hit with local consumers. “It pays for itself now and gives my wife a decent salary,” says Lynn. “I’m not looking to get rich off of it while it’s a range. The rule of thumb is it takes a couple of years to get your business up and going, but we’ve been doing pretty well from day one.”

Home Sweet Home
Much of the reason for the Hayungses’ success harkens back to their attention to customer comfort and convenience. The centerpiece of the Practice Tee is the 3,500-square-foot clubhouse. Customers enter the building from the parking lot right into the pro shop, where buckets of balls await them on the counter. The pro shop offers a full selection of clubs, irons and putters, as well as soft goods like gloves, shoes, hats and shirts. There’s also golf knickknacks for sale like desk calendars and pen sets.

The Hayungses have sold about 10 sets of clubs since opening in April 2004, and they’re just now starting to sell used clubs. Club repair and fitting is the next addition to their services, and a room is already set aside for just that purpose. “I have a room inside with a workbench and all the tools to do club repair, but right now it’s full of cases of beer and Cokes,” says Lynn. “I need to add another storage room and we’ll be ready.”

The pro shop cash register is in the corner, next to a bar counter with three stools that look right out a window to the tee line. A large, open doorway leads into the most inviting part of the clubhouse, where four table-and-chair sets are joined by a leather couch and love seat, nestled in front of satellite TV.

To encourage folks to hang around, cards, checkers, chess and backgammon are readily available and provide great diversions for kids who accompany a parent to the facility.

For those customers who make it outside but don’t necessarily want to hit balls, there are several comfortable areas to sit and watch. In addition to a patio with picnic umbrellas, there are rocking chairs on the old-fashioned, shady porch overlooking the tee line.

“At the other range, they had maybe three folding chairs and there was no place to sit if you weren’t hitting balls,” says Lynn. “My wife was always wondering why they didn’t put more chairs out, so we kind of expanded on that idea and made the wide porch in front. Now we get wives who come over, buy a bottle of wine and sit on the porch, listen to music and watch their husbands hit a bucket of balls. I think some of those kind of things encourage more of the family to come out.”

Staff take food and beverage orders on the tee line. Buckets of beer on ice are particularly popular, and Lynn says half his sales are probably in beer. The Practice Tee doesn’t offer liquor, and the snack bar offers a limited and simple menu of cold or microwave sandwiches. A Papa John’s Pizza phone number is displayed in the clubhouse and customers are welcome to order a hot pie that arrives in about 20 minutes.

On Fridays, Lynn fires up the barbecue pit and cooks fajitas, chicken and sausage in what is somewhat of a Pharr tradition, as customers were once allowed to cook for themselves on a pit at the old Practice Tee facility.

“We spend most of our time on the week-ends at the range, and we wanted to do something the family could do together,” explains Martha of the continued tradition. “My husband is a great cook and it’s a lot of fun.”

The Practice Tee is building a good local reputation by being amenable to the community. Often, Lynn and Martha will keep the range open late to accommodate customers. For instance, the local Outback restaurant called one night to ask if 40 employees could come over for a little impromptu party after work. For such events, Lynn rolls out ice chests of beer to the tee line and lines up the buckets of balls with loaner clubs. In addition, employees from several local businesses regularly convene at the Practice Tee for lunch, enjoy the dining area and then hit a few buckets before heading back to work.

The Hayungses keep coupons and fliers regularly flowing to those local offices to encourage that business to continue. Martha says a lot of repeat business is for the simplest reasons.

“We get so many people who tell us how clean our restrooms are,” she says. “The guys always say it feels like home, all we need is a shower in there.”

The Grass Is Greener
Well-manicured grass tees and greens are another reason customers return to the Practice Tee, but, as Lynn tells it, building them was no easy feat.

Construction began in September 2003, with the Hayungses hoping to get the grass planted and the facility open that winter, but heavy rains completely shut down construction and delayed the opening until April.

“They had just busted all the ground, so it turned into a mud hole for about a month and a half,” Lynn recalls. “And then that set us back so far, say from the first of December through the end of February, because nothing grows here then. It stays green but everything goes dormant and yards don’t grow. So trying to get grass to grow and certain seeds to germinate and simulate fairways and things like that, we just had a lot of trouble getting the grass to take off.”

Lynn was a novice in the golf range industry, but he knew good grass meant a better range, not just physically but also in the perception of the patrons. “My [younger] sons are both golfers, and we started spending a lot of time at the range,” he says of the original Practice Tee. “The greens were terrible and there were weeds growing everywhere. They just had regular grass on the tee box and everything 5 feet in front was just dirt.”

What the original facility didn’t lack, though, was customers. “They were just lined up there at night,” says Lynn. “And I told my wife this would be a good business, and I guess that got the ball rolling.”

In addition to buying the Practice Tee name, Lynn also purchased the clubhouse building, the lights and some other odds and ends, and moved them all across town to a better location. He paid $4,000 to move the building and ended up remodeling and doubling the clubhouse size to nearly 3,500 square feet, and the process still saved him in construction costs and labor. “Since I was buying everything, it just made sense to use as much of it as I could,” says Lynn.

Meanwhile, he seeded the fairways of his new property with a standard Bermuda grass, sprigged the greens with Tifdwarf and sodded the tee line with Tif 419 Bermuda. “That’s one of the biggest things, knowing what to do with the grass, knowing when to fertilize and what to watch for,” Lynn says. “I spoke to a lot of people.” One of those was Bill Freeman, head groundskeeper at the Cimarron Country Club, where Lynn is a member. Freeman has been in the golf business all his life, some 40 years now, and “was a great help in getting us up and going.”

After a month of trying to keep the ground wet so the grass would grow in during construction, Lynn was shocked when he opened his first city water bill. It was “about $600,” he says.

So Lynn quickly set about implementing his original plan, which was to install a standpipe where he could set a well pump in the bottom and gravity feed water into the pipe from the local irrigation district on the Rio Grande. Irrigation districts were set up in the western part of the U.S. to supply affordable river water to farmers, but now, in many areas, there are more homes than farmlands. The districts, with their big pumps along the river, are running out of customers to sell water to, so the Practice Tee was a natural fit. The center’s standpipe is hooked up to a sprinkler system that covers the 14-acre golf range and has cut the monthly water bill to $65.
“I’m putting water on the whole 14 acres every other day and that keeps everything green,” Lynn says. “I spent about $15,000 putting in the standpipe and the well pump and all that, but it’s going to pay for itself in the first year.”

The care and feeding of the Practice Tee’s picturesque greens and grass areas have since been turned over to local All-Star Turf, an award-winning landscaping business in the region. Letting those professionals handle the fertilizing and reseeding and other

specialized areas of grass maintenance allows the Hayungses to keep a smaller staff, with Lynn chipping in at night and on weekends, and their four sons, Ryan, Chris, Dustin and Kyle, working some afternoons and evenings.

Everything’s Bigger in Texas
The Practice Tee’s 550-foot-wide by 150-yard-deep natural grass tee line can accommodate up to 70 golfers at a time, rotated regularly with a rope line. The grass quality is so good, Lynn says, he doesn’t get halfway back in his rotation and the front has already grown back ready to use.

He’s most proud of the short game practice area. The 2,500-square-foot chipping green includes a sand bunker, and customers can practice any shot to the green from up to 30 yards out. A purchase of a bucket of balls authorizes access to the area, also including a spacious, 4,500-square-foot putting green, but Lynn has been disappointed so far in the usage of the short game area.

“I thought that area would be used the most and it’s probably used the least,” he says. “What I’m seeing is most people come to the driving range, and the first thing they do is pull their driver out of the bag and they just wail at the ball. Nobody practices the way you’re supposed to practice, starting with your short irons and working your way through the bag.”

Customers on the tee line enjoy three net targets set up 40 to 50 yards off the line for short shot practice. There are also four elevated target greens at 100, 125, 150 and 300 yards on the 220-yard-wide by 325-yard-deep landing area.

On sweltering days, customers can hit from one of six covered bays with artificial turf mats, three on each side of the clubhouse under two canopies. Lynn liked the look of the covered tees and wanted to give customers a shady option on hot summer days, but truth is, the Practice Tee is still looking for ways to generate more daytime business and when customers do come out, the grass is so good, they prefer to hit off of it.

“Our business slowed down considerably when school started,” says Lynn. “It’s picked up some as the Winter Texans get to town. We’re starting to see a little more daytime business, but at nighttime the tee box gets lined from one side to the other.”

The Practice Tee is offering dollar-off coupons for buckets during the day, and making sure those coupons find their way to the huge RV parks where the Winter Texans take up residence this time of year. Lynn has also contracted with South Texas College to let the school’s golf team use the facility, and he’s doing some cable TV advertising. Mostly, though, he’s relying on word-of-mouth and return business, and so far, so good.

“We get a lot of people from out of town coming in,” he says. “I’m surprised how many people we get from Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, who are here on business. They’ve got their clubs and they stop and hit some balls. We’ve had people from out of town who said, ‘We don’t even have a place like this in these big cities.’ A guy from Houston wants us to build a range like this up there.”

Making It Work
Out-of-towners and local golfers alike can hone their skills with lessons from one of four independent contractors who provide on-site golf instruction. The instructors set their own rates and pay a $5 usage fee back to the range for each private lesson or group clinic they give. The Hayungses let the instructors set their own hours and run that end of the business. It all fits in with a concept of cost containment while offering a full range of services.

“The biggest thing in this business is watching your investment to make sure you can cover your expenses,” says Lynn. “To keep a facility as nice as this, it’s expensive. You spend a lot of money in maintaining equipment and fertilizer and water. It’s something all the time. I don’t know if a guy isn’t better off having a cow pasture as far as just a moneymaking thing.”

Lynn admits there was probably a “happy medium.” Right now, though, he wouldn’t trade his facility for anything. Not only has the Practice Tee been profitable, it’s been fun for the entire family—his family.

“It is a lot of fun, especially being with my family,” he says. “But it’s amazing how many really nice people we’ve met in the golf industry. It seems like golfers are all pretty much nice people—at least that’s been our experience.”

And that’s the same experience golfers get when they meet the Hayungses at the Practice Tee.