How long should it take to play a round of golf? There are two ways of thinking about that question. The first is to think of playing when you have the course to yourself. Then the time to play is just a question of how good or bad your own game is. If all your drives are true, you can finish your round quickly. If you are king of the three (or possibly four) putt, you’re going to be longer on the course.
But players rarely have the course to themselves. Players preferences for playing times are correlated in the sense that more people have time to play on the weekend than on Tuesday morning. That means players have to share the course. A different set of factors come into play. How fast your party can play depends in part on what others on the course are doing, how the course is set up, and how the course gives out tee times. Said another way, the time it takes to play a round of golf depends on process design and production scheduling. Here is how the Wall Street Journal describes the problem (The Real Causes of Slow Play, Jul 13).
But according to Bill Yates, a former industry efficiency expert whose main business now is consulting with golf courses about speeding up the game, player behavior ranks only second on his list of slow play’s five major causes. No. 1: course-management practices and policies. “Players can be blamed for a lot, yes, but if courses are sending out too many players too fast, nobody has a chance,” he said. …
No. 3 on Yates’s list of slow-play causes is player ability. As quickly as high-handicappers may try to scoot around the course, they take more shots and require more time than better golfers do, especially when they play from tees too long for their ability. No. 4 is the way courses are set up and maintained—the speed of the greens and depth of the rough, for example.
No. 5 is a course’s architectural design. Backups often start on a course’s first par-three, Yates said. If tee times are spaced at eight-minute intervals, but the first par-three takes an average of 10 minutes to play, a course has a mess on its hands by the fourth or fifth group of the day. If the next hole is a par-five whose green some players try to reach in two, you know you’re in for a long day.
Many of the ideas here are just basic operations management. Think about why par-threes or shortish par-fives are problem. A par-three should take less time to play because it (in theory) requires fewer strokes and features a shorter walk from tee to green. That suggests that a course of nothing but par-threes should have the shortest playing time. That would likely be true if everyone could have the course to themselves. However, the shorter holes also suggest that fewer parties can be on them at the same time. On a long par-five, a trailing party can be teeing off while a leading party can be putting. (This is why short par-fives are a problem. If the drive-for-show types want to reach the green in two, they have to wait for the green to clear.) If a long par-five can always accommodate two parties but doesn’t take twice as long to play as par-three, it will have a higher capacity than a par-three. A course with nothing but long par-fives would then allow the most players to get in a round over a day.
But no one wants a course with only one type of hole. A good course offers a variety of challenges and features holes that require varying sets of skills. That gets to the comment above about courses sending out players too fast. Just what does “too fast” mean? Suppose the average hole at a course takes ten minutes to play. If tee times are ten minutes apart, then congestion on the course should be minimal, right? Not necessarily. If there is a hole that takes twelve minutes to play, having players released every ten minutes will cause a back up at the long-playing “bottleneck” hole.
Even that statement requires a couple caveats. First, what really matters is the capacity of each hole which is related to — but not completely determined by — how many minutes it takes to play a hole. This gets back to the question of how may foursomes can be on the hole at the same time.
Second, even if we have a clear idea of which hole is the bottleneck, we can get into trouble if we match the release of players to the capacity of the bottleneck. Variability becomes a problem. Suppose every hole on the course has the capacity of six parties per hour. If players start off every ten minutes, we can still have problems because players are not mechanically precise. The average party may play, say, the third hole in ten minutes but some may take twelve while others take eight. Have enough variability in how players make it though the course, and congestion and delays could be quite bad.
This gets to an interesting conundrum raised in the article.
The key to golfer happiness, Yates believes, is the uninterrupted flow of a round, more than the absolute time it takes. And that depends above all on staggering tee times at just the right interval for each course—in some cases 10 or 11 minutes, as opposed to a more common seven or eight minutes—and keeping precisely to that schedule.
“It’s a delicate balance,” Yates acknowledges. Courses naturally want to maximize revenue by pushing as many paying golfers as possible onto the course, but they do so at peril of alienating their clientele. “It’s usually not the time itself, but the experience of time that makes people mad,” Yates said. Many courses, including some run by the big national course-management groups, get the balance right, but many more fail.
Customer service and revenue are then potentially in conflict. This is likely to be a particularly sore point at courses with very spiked demand. Consider a non-resort location that mainly serves non-retired players. They will all want weekend tee times. There will be pressure to have as many weekend tee times as possible even if that means that everyone will face delay on the course.