Hand it to Palm Beach County. They know their golf down therein South Florida. It turns out they know their golf ranges too.

The new John Prince Golf Learning Center in Lake Worth, Fla., is a top-flight golf range and teaching facility, and a welcome addition for the golf-hungry populace of Palm Beach County. The teaching-intensive John Prince Center also is the winner of the Golf Range Times 2008 Best New Range Award.

Quite simply, this is no ordinary facility, located in no ordinary golf venue. Golfable.com lists 160 golf courses and clubs in Palm Beach County, making the region one of the most golf- happy areas in the country. But John Prince, opened this past June, is thriving amid all that competition for the golfing dollar.

Except the manager of the new center don't see it that way at all.

"Our commitment is to growing the game of golf," says Paul Connell, Palm Beach County's golf operations supervisor. "We're not in competition with any of the courses or other ranges."

The John Prince facility is owned and operated by the Palm Beach County Parks and Recreation Department, and is part of a system of three public courses, with a fourth one on the way. Those public facilities, all catering to growing the game for the good of the county and its citizens, now include the learning center with its 45 tee stations, three practice holes, and a 16,000-square-foot putting and chipping practice area.

The center is located on 38 acres that are part of the much larger John Prince Park, just off busy Interstate 95 (John Prince Park is named after a former local official). In addition to golf, the park also offers fishing, water skiing, boating, camping, picnic areas, nature trails, a therapeutic recreation center, baseball and softball, and parks and recreation offices on its 726 total acres, which includes 338-acre Lake Osborne.

"We do a first-class job in developing parks," Connell explains. " The public has high expectations for what we do, so any endeavor we get into, we want to make sure it's similar to our other facilities. It has to be well-designed, well-maintained, and has to operate really well." John Prince is up to par on all those fronts.

The new facility might be a surprise for some of the snowbird Floridians who are just getting back to town to see what has sprung up off Lake Osborne. Connell and the staff at John Prince look forward to their first full season to see what the facility can do as a viable business, and what they can achieve as a future hub of teaching golf and producing more golfers for all of Palm Beach County's courses.

Connell and the staff at John Prince look forward to their first full season to see what the facility can do as a viable business, and what they can achieve as a future hub of teaching golf and producing more golfers for all of Palm Beach County's courses.

FROM TEE TO GREEN
John Prince bills itself as a comprehensive learning facility. In addition to the 45 grass hitting stations, there's an adjacent artificial turf teeing area with the same number of stations just behind those grass tees overlooking the Tifway 419 landing area. Two CoverShots mobile canopies can be moved up and down the line to shade 10 stations or to protect golfers from inclement weather.

John Prince also is one of the few lighted practice facilities in Palm Beach County, another major draw. Then there's that 16,000-square-foot putting and chipping area with a TifEagle green. If that practice area didn't show enough of a commitment to teaching, then how about three regulation practice holes?

Two par-3 and one challenging par-4 practice hole give John Prince that little some- thing extra that so many ranges lack-facilities that take new players from the tee line right to the tee-all on one site.

"They can go from complete beginners to actually getting on a golf course, all without ever leaving this facility," said John Prince head professional Mark Mayette. "We're only (seven) months into this and to be honest, I really look forward to what we can do here."

While the facility is still growing as a destination for golf instruction, the John Prince Golf Learning Center is already an interesting meld of public and private business concerns. The Palm Beach County Parks and Recreation Department runs and staffs most of the facility. However, the local government office contracts out the golf programming and merchandising to Golf Professional Ser- vices Inc., a local firm that handles similar duties at other county courses.

Owned and operated by former LPGA player Donna White, GPS provides the teaching pros, and plans the teaching program and merchandising in the pro shop. However, Palm Beach County employees handle all the money at the facility.

"Government systems aren't set up to react quickly to changes in consumer demands and the things that go along with merchandising, and we see that the margins can be fairly slim," Connell says. "We look at a lot of our programs as a risk- reward-type situation. Private- sector operators are much better at golf shop merchandising than we could ever be."

Working within the local government framework often requires more planning and patience than in the private sector. Connell points out that while Palm Beach County's capital improvements division does a good job on buildings and infrastructure, it really isn't experienced with building greens and grass areas. For that reason, Connell brought in some outside help with more experience during the planning and construction phases.

The facility contracts with Golf Professional Services to bring in a staff of seven golf pros, all PGA or LPGA members or apprentices, forming an instructors' group that might be the envy of any high-end private club. Twenty-three-year veteran Mayette oversees the instructors as head pro, and he has a proven array of teaching programs, designed by Golf Professional Services, that have won national recognition at other facilities.

Perhaps more importantly, though, GPS' Mayette's approach meshes perfectly with the overall philosophy at John Prince, where teaching and bringing new players to the game are the primary concerns.

"Here, the focus is growing the game, and it's such a rewarding thing to see someone improve when you're teaching golf," Mayette says. "There's nothing more satisfying than seeing someone improve in the game of golf. It reflects in their eyes, in their face-it's just awesome."

Golf Professional Services has a five-level instruction pro- gram for juniors and adults, taking beginners from the tee line to the course and advancing students through each stage. The five-level approach has proved itself over and over at Okeeheelee and Park Ridge Public golf courses, two other facilities where the parks and recreation department and GPS have teamed up. The proven teaching method also has helped the Junior Golf Foundation of America arm of GPS win four PGA Junior Golf Leadership Awards.

"It's a pretty simple pro- gram," Mayette says. "It was an easy transition for me because I adopted all the successful pro- grams that Okeeheelee Golf Course already had in place for the last 12 years."

That extensive teaching starts with kids as young as 4 in the "Little Linkers" program. In addition, Mayette schedules several theme clinics. Short game clinics, for-ladies-only programs, full-swing instruction and other special seminars at the range, for both juniors and adults, are particularly popular. "The thing that makes our programs very good is that our student-teacher ratio is never more than 8-to-1 in a group setting," Mayette adds. "We're pretty proud of that."

INNOVATIVE IDEAS
In addition to the five-level program and the standard offerings of lessons and clinics, Mayette is utilizing other ideas to build business and better serve long-term goals at John Prince. The facility is involved with the United States Golf Association First Tee's Starting New At Golf (SNAG) initiative, a program that introduces golf to young players with oversized clubs, balls and targets.

"I call it Flintstones golf because they use large colorful plastic clubs for safety, and you can hit tennis balls," Mayette says. "We have the equipment here, but they start them in gym classes at the local elementary schools."

Mayette serves on a committee that oversees the SNAG program at 28 Palm Beach County schools. John Prince will serve as the transition facility when the young golfers move from the gymnasiums outdoors and begin learning to transition to real golf equipment.

"It's very exciting. We had our first three groups in here in December," Mayette says. "They're getting to see what real clubs are like and what it's like to play on real grass. You can just imagine the number of kids we're going to be able to reach at those 28 schools."

While the junior program is a major point of emphasis, Mayette and the Palm Beach County Parks and Recreation Department focus on all ages. There's a wall where officials post a schedule that is two months in advance.

And the John Prince staff isn't just waiting for customers to come in, either. They're out in the community drumming up business to make the most of the county's investment in the game. In addition to a Web site, direct mail, and radio and news- paper advertising, Mayette and his teaching staff are frequent speakers at community events. One program has seen them visiting local homeowners associations, groups anxious to bring programming to their communities. A quick golf lesson is a great fit and a great way to spread the word about John Prince Golf Learning Center.

"That's our best advertising, word of mouth," Mayette says. "If people come out here and see what we have, they're likely to come back again."

Connell and Mayette are working to ensure that customers come back. Currently, they're looking into developing more programs for teenagers, an underserved segment that sometimes strays away from the game. "We see a lot of junior golfers that stop playing around 12 or 13," Connell says. "We want to keep them playing between the early teens and early adulthood, and we're investing in that."

Going that extra mile in serving the community is what Connell, Mayette and the entire staff are most of proud of at John Prince. Employees are polite, respectful and helpful at the facility, combining the best of a government mandate with a private-sector competitive mindset.

"Customer service is really, really important for us, especially as a governmental agency where we have the responsibility of taking care of the facilities that the public has helped to build," Connell says. "When we hear back from the customers about how much they like our facility, how well they're treated at our facility, that's what really makes us feel good."

GOLF & GOVERNMENT
Palm Beach County isn't the only municipality making golf a priority, with local government owning and operating courses and ranges to help drive economic engines. Notably, the cities of Houston and Sacramento have made similar commitments.

Palm Beach County Parks and Recreation first entered this realm in the early 1980s, with the department purchasing an 18-hole course in Boca Raton that had fallen into disrepair. Local residents urged the takeover, and Southwinds Golf Course became the county's first foray into golf ownership.

Since then, 27-hole Okeeheelee Public Golf Course in West Palm Beach, and the Park Ridge Public Golf Course, built on a landfill in Lake Worth, have been added. Connell says another 27-hole course is close to opening, but has run into some permitting problems.

Connell knows the value of adding golf facilities to grow golf, a real theme for Palm Beach County.

"Our department sees golf as a lifelong, rewarding, challenging recreational activity and similar to all of our other recreational activities," he says, expressing a view not shared by all parks and recreations offices, many of which focus primarily on youth sports. "We try to provide the best locations and the best services to meet the needs of the public."

The commitment to golf and public golf facilities also has aided in protecting green space and keeping open space for public use in the face of growth and development on the bustling Gold Coast.

"There were a large number of ranges in this area that had been closed due to development pressure," added Connell. "The value of land had increased so much that the range owners were selling out."

REBUILDING A RANGE: GET GOOD HELP
The current John Prince Golf Learning Center was formerly a range, but the facility fell into disrepair. Hurricane Francis and then Jeanne had rolled through South Florida in the fall of 2004, and both storms exacted a heavy toll. By the time Hurricane Wilma came through in the fall of 2005, the facility was being used as a site for cleaning and staging the local reconstruction.

"This site was an eyesore," Connell said. "It had just been devastated."

But in reviewing the records from the old range, Connell and county officials saw that there was "a sufficient demand in the area for a stand-alone range," he recalled. "It was obvious that a range could be successful here. It was just as the range had deteriorated, the activity and the revenue had decreased substantially."

Connell began working on plans to renovate and reopen the facility. He wanted to improve the grounds and equipment and put a singular focus on teaching and bringing potential new players into golf.

And Connell, who has been on the job in Palm Beach County for 16 years, knows the ins and outs of getting golf facilities up and running. "This is our fourth project so we definitely have had a number of good projects in this area," he says. "We've learned from some of the mistakes we've made over the history of our golf operations."

Experience served Connell well as he set about opening John Prince. One of his first decisions was to hire an experienced superintendent, John Baute, to oversee the installation of grass. Baute planted top- of-the-line Bermuda grasses on the landing areas and fairways. Native tall grasses surround the perimeter, adding a natural, scenic flavor to the facility.

Even with water restrictions in Palm Beach County for part of the first year, Baute's work was solid, and it shows on the pristine greens, fairways and landing areas. "We had to reduce our water use by 45 percent at one point, and we still made it through," Connell says. "Even local (golf course) superintendents here have complimented us on the conditions of the facility. [Baute] did a really good job of coordinating with the contractor and making sure everything was installed in a way that was maintainable once construction was complete."

Connell also was pleased with the local firm, Weitz Golf International, which handled construction of the facility. Matt Swanson was the main architect, and he proved responsive to the parks and recreation department's needs.

"Getting a good architect that is willing to work with you, understands what your goals are and understands the customers that will be using the facility is really important too," Connell says. "That way you don't design a facility that's either too difficult for the average golfer or just plain not enjoyable for anyone." Apparently, the John Prince Golf Learning Center is hitting its target. "Our daily sales totals have been exceeding what we budgeted," said Connell. "And I think this year will be even better."