Finding My Passion
I first saw a synthetic golf green late in the year 2000 while I was living in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was the most supreme AHA! moments of my life. As a kid, one of my go-to hobbies was to take the weed eater to our back lawn, cut it down as short as I could manage and then plant an empty soup can in the ground for a cup, then use a stick or whatever I could find as a flag. Bam! Golf Green! You certainly couldn’t putt on it but chipping to it and hitting full shots with whiffle balls was a thrill.
I think it was this experience that planted the seed, which would burst into full bloom when I looked up toward the teaching area, at one of the local courses I was playing in Vegas that year, to see an artificial turf putting and chipping surface. It was perfection. A perfect contrast of short, light green putting surface with taller, darker green fringe around the outside. It blew my mind! I put it together that a person could have a golf green in their backyard without the near impossible task of maintaining it properly.
In the days that followed, my friend Shaun I packed up our gear and headed back to BC. We both moved in with my parents for a while and sitting around the BBQ with my Dad one evening it washed over me like the surest thing I could imagine saying. “Dad, we should build you a golf green. We should build you a golf green and if it works, we should make a business out of it!”. And from there, the greatest opportunity came into my life. My parents would shelter and feed Shaun and I for a summer and pay for the cost of the materials of the golf green if, in return, we just did the work. Game on!!
We spent all summer on that little masterpiece. Then our buddy Nate rigged up a 1000 watt flood light with remote control and we partied on that sucker for the rest of the summer. I was a competitive amateur golfer at the time and that particular green got running 15 on the stimp meter (faster than Augusta National). I learned how to get the ball rolling on-line on that thing and took that stroke to the course and even won a couple of tournaments that Summer. It was playing those tournaments that I realized I preferred to work hard and build golf greens more than anything else, and that is how I would spend the next 18 years of my life.
The business morphed a little over time as we chased opportunities that existed in using artificial turf as a lawn application. We also started another business distributing turf. Building golf greens dwindled to less than 20% of the installations we would do. My heart was still with the golf applications, but it was hard to control the resources in the company enough to justify keeping golf on the company’s priority list. I got into the business because of an aha moment, and because I knew I was following a passion and a purpose, and as the business I helped create started to take on a life of its own, I needed to leave to reset my site lines.
I had sold that company in late 2018, and the turf distribution company the year prior. I couldn’t help but feel I needed to realign my focus on golf specific work. While I was with my original company, I designed and constructed over 500 golf green projects and thousands of artificial turf lawns. I am a Certified Master Installer and enjoyed that part of my life a great deal. In the time that followed the sale of those businesses I was able to be at home for my family through the Covid pandemic, I was with my kids every day through their formative years, an opportunity many people don’t get, and I researched and developed ideas that are going to move my industry forward in the coming decade. I worked hard on my design modalities and I tuned into what others were doing from around the World. I looked closely at cutting edge techniques, technologies and ideas. I studied modern golf design and have bottled it all up into The Golf Park Company, and we are ready to explode.
I look now to establish myself as the person who can design and build unique, world-class golf projects with a goal to bring the game of golf to our communities in ways that haven’t been seen. I would like to bring the game of golf down in size so that everyone can play it for little or no cost at all.
This is the beginning of another chapter in my life. This time I aim to stay true to my passion and the creative process it beholds.