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Marty Yates had eye-catching golf targets on his range for six years. And he’d probably still have them if his supplier hadn’t gone out of business.
Yates’ 40-tee station, On Target Family Sports Center in Jonesboro, Ark., is a microcosm of the best and the worst of the target game business that range owners must navigate when considering adding the amenity.
“I couldn’t get as much out of the targets because it took too much of my time to run it the way they tell you to,” says Yates. “After six years, one of the targets got weathered and we couldn’t replace it so we took all of them out. I probably would have replaced it because aesthetically those five targets out there brought in a lot of business from people just curious about them.”
Targets, available in all shapes, sizes, colors, and with accompanying—often literally—bells and whistles, allow range owners to offer scoring games for practicing golfers and a nontraditional amenity to bring in new crowds. The hope at many ranges was to make a subtle shift to more of a bowling alley mentality, with regular competitors and leagues driving a more consistent and steady flow of traffic to the range. But it didn’t always work out that way. Yates never found the time to set up the leagues and do all the paperwork competitive play would have required. “Any small range owner knows how that is,” he says. “There are always 18,000 other things I need to deal with, and my margins weren’t enough for me to hire someone to run it.”
Still, just having the targets was valuable enough for him to seek a replacement in 2003, when the tarp on one began deteriorating. Yates has no complaints about the durability of the targets; he just couldn’t get a mulligan because his vendor, On Target Game—from which his range derived its name—wasn’t supplying the colorful light-and-buzzer scoring targets anymore.
On Target isn’t the only company that’s shut its doors. Boulder, Colo.-based Best
Shot Inc., also has stopped manufacturing, though co-owner Mark Wood still regularly fields calls about his life-size simulated targets, traps and water hazards that feature applause and splash sounds, lights and a scoring system.
“I helped start this company in 1995, and I know the industry really well,” says Wood. “The people who manufacture the products aren’t listening to the customers who spend the money. There is a market for targets and games on ranges, I just don’t think it’s been executed properly by people who have the right funding.”
Now it may be too late for suppliers like Best Shot, who have always grabbed range owners’ attention but have had a tough sell in getting them to plop down anywhere from a couple hundred dollars for a basic target to $3,000 or more for a high-end unit with installation.
Ed Haas, owner of Golf BullsEye Inc., another target manufacturer that has pulled away from the range market, says his targets weren’t quite that expensive in and of themselves, but to package and deliver the 44-inch galvanized-steel units cost well over $400.
Haas says his and other target companies’ products weren’t very practical. “You start considering the range maintenance and the problems with picking balls with automatic pickers, and for a lot of range owners, it just wasn’t worth it,” he says.
Another target manufacturer, Phoenix-based GlowRange, and its once-popular lighted targets and glow-in-the-dark balls for night play, has sold out to a corporate events organizing firm, and is also out of the golf range business.
“Basically our stuff was too expensive and no one could afford it except a select part of the market,” says former GlowRange co-owner Kyle Hogan. “It’s a great product but a little over-engineered. The three targets at the highest end are $3,500, and that can get over $5,000 with installation.”
Now, GlowRange is just used in special events for the likes of pharmaceutical companies and insurance or investment groups, businesses that can afford a one-time $6,000 price tag for a two-hour event.
Since the boom in the range-specific target game industry in the mid-’90s, golf range owners have had fewer and fewer options when searching for targets. And even owners who understand the full benefit of the systems aren’t usually willing to make the capital investment required, according to frustrated manufacturers who weren’t able to match their products with more ranges.
Range owners “do go out and spend $60,000 and more to put in miniature golf,” says Izzy Reinish, CEO of Range-Play Entertainment in Boulder, one of the last range target distributors still standing. “They’ll spend that and more to put in batting cages, so it’s not that they’re totally averse to putting in amenities. The truth is that nobody wants to be first with a new product. There aren’t any testimonials or results they can observe yet.”
For smaller ranges, like Yates’ Jonesboro facility, there’s some value in having target games but no margin for error. Larger facilities often choose other amenities or have bigger markets to draw from and don’t necessarily need the anticipated bump in business, making them a hard sell for something completely new, too.
So suddenly, the new trend isn’t range owners picking and choosing target products for their facility; it’s higher-end target companies buying or leasing ranges to bring in expensive automated systems like the $4.5 million investment Golf Entertainment International just made at the former Mid-Atlantic Golf Center-Kingstowne in Alexandria, Va.
The new TopGolf Game Center opened in early August with its custom point-scoring golf game using real clubs and golf balls that contain microchips. From the tee line, players aim at 11 sensor-equipped target greens situated from 25 to 240 yards. Distances and scores for most accurate shots are instantly relayed to a screen in each player’s bay, the top of the line in the target game genre.
TopGolf has already proven successful at two locations in England, and another British site and a site in Thailand have also recently opened.
The leased facility in Alexandria is the first run for the concept in North America, and one everyone in the golf industry will have their eyes on. Golf Entertainment Inter-national Chief Operating Officer Peter Allport says a second facility will open in the U.S. within the year, and eventually, the corporation plans 150 TopGolf Game Center facilities nationwide.
“I think this is something that the industry could benefit from,” says Reinish of TopGolf’s initiative. “But I have to tell you the industry is slow to react. People talk about businesses thinking outside the box, well, golf is a 400-year-old box.”
Reinish took his company’s Range-Play Scramble System, the newest of the target games available on the market, on tour in the summer of 2004. The interactive game uses targets with built-in sensors that contain wireless radio transmitters. When a target is hit, results are displayed on a large scoreboard. There are several different target games, many played against a clock that can keep tee stations humming.
“Everywhere we went, people loved it,” says Reinish of his demo tour. “Everyone was interested and we came away without making a single sale.”
The original startup cost for the Range-Play Scramble System was $75,000, though the company’s owners have been able to reduce that price somewhat with more basic targets and by offering options that don’t include the scoreboard. It’s still a tough sell to most ranges despite the obvious advantages of reaching new audiences.
Range-Play has one sale to date, a golf academy in Glencoe, Ill., outside of Chicago, that took the plunge, not so much to attract new golfers as to keep the avid ones interested with a new format.
“We had been looking for something that could engage a person and provide feedback,” says GreenToTee Golf Academy President and Owner Joe Bosco, who brought the system to the golf club, his academy’s home. “Finding ways to make the range more interesting from a practice standpoint, from an instructional standpoint and having the focus on specific targets was very important.”
The first weekend his facility had the Range-Play games up and running, the range “went through five times as many golf balls and buckets” as usual. As a certified instructor at Chicagoland’s largest golf school, Bosco also endorses the concept of target play. This academy definitely isn’t “old school.”
“Keeping those kids interested in hitting targets and freed up from all the mechanics all the time is really one of the best reasons to have more interactive and engaging targets,” he says. “If it’s good for kids, it’s good for the kid-learner in adults, as well. It’s really open season for this type of thing, but I think most range operators are afraid of the change.”
Haas of Golf BullsEye believes so much in the need for change in the golf practice industry that he hasn’t ditched his business, just “changed his focus.” This September, he opened his own facility in Rio Rancho, N.M., near Albuquerque, with two nine-hole play modes (a series of targets) and a short-distance driving range.
Golf BullsEye’s free-standing, slanted targets are distinctive and durable, with a vertically-centered, 7-foot flagpole that protrudes up through the regulation-sized golf hole. A ringing bell signals a hole-in-one and is part of the circuitry of the battery-charged system.
“We’re basically trying to meet the needs of small children and beginning golfers who aren’t being served by executive courses, full-size courses or miniature golf, which really isn’t golf at all,” says Haas. “There’s really no place to go try the game out with kids to see if you’ve got the next Tiger Woods or Michelle Wie. On the courses, you hear the complaints about how kids out there slow down play. I want to bridge the gap between miniature golf and full-size courses and give families somewhere to play.”
Haas plans to build more sites in the Southwest if this first one takes off. Eventually, he would like to sell franchises and grow his business, and he hopes to start a trend to do the same for the entire golf industry. “From what I’m hearing, the little par-3 course and even the range owners have been selling out to land developers because the land is worth more than the revenues they can generate,” he says. “As more facilities close up, there’s just no place to go try the game out, and that’s not good for any of us in this business. It’s time to try some new things.”
Back in Arkansas, Yates agrees, even though he never got the maximum benefit out of his targets. “There’s just something about those big, bright targets out there,” he says. “People loved hitting at them. Offering competitive games didn’t work for me but it’s something I can see how it could work and be successful in bigger markets.”
Reinish thinks an industry-wide effort can open new doors for all target products. “Part of helping us bring our price down will be getting the industry involved as sponsors,” he says. “Our scoreboards are basically billboards so that’s one way. And there’s no better place to sell golf products than to someone standing on a tee line.”
There’s one mistake everyone in the golf industry is making, says Reinish, and that’s failing to bring more new players into the game.
“Marketing people think about how they can sell more to their demographic instead of expanding their demographic,” he says. “There are as many want-to-be golfers as there are golfers. We have to get them out there playing somehow. To ignore them is sheer lunacy.”
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