Andy Tullis / The BulletinA golfer tees off on No. 10 at the Big Meadow course at Black Butte Ranch while his playing partner watches.

For golf, any growth is good growth.

The peak of the golf season — which here in Central Oregon runs roughly from mid-June through mid-September — is rapidly coming to an end for 2014. For most of the region’s 30 golf courses, that means an accounting of just how many golfers turned out during the meat of the season.

So what is the verdict?

As daylight grows shorter and temperatures begin to drop, the overall opinion of the 2014 golf season seems to be, well, not bad … but not great, either.

“I think we’re going to look back at the season as generally an overall success,” says Scott Huntsman, Black Butte Ranch’s president and CEO. “We just aren’t going to be able to grow rounds like we thought we were going to.”

Huntsman’s response seems to echo the golf-industry consensus.

Across Central Oregon, golf courses are reporting an up-and-down season. The good news is that, for many, it appears that there was a touch more up than down.

But that might not have been the case.

For instance, for much of the year, Quail Run Golf Course in La Pine seemed headed for a down year compared with 2013.

“Then August really pumped up,” says Todd Sickles, the general manager at Quail Run, who struggles to explain the uptick. “For some reason August all of a sudden beat the last few years.

“It’s so unpredictable. The spring was good for us. June, July were kind of flat, and then August was busy. It was just all of a sudden crazy.”

In the end, that means a positive year for Quail Run, Sickles says. And Quail Run is not alone in its season-ending flourish.

Pronghorn Club, which reports a 15 percent increase in golf business this year, had to push back its aerification schedule by a month to accommodate “more business on the books for September than we did in July,” says head professional Jerrel Grow.

The Old Back Nine at Mountain High experienced a relatively slow summer, something club manager Mark Reisinger blames on occasional thunderstorms and relatively hot and smoky conditions in the region. But the south Bend course has also seen a boost in business so far in September.

And Zach Lampert, Meadow Lakes Golf Course’s head pro and facility manager, is hopeful that a strong fall season can add to what has been a flat year at Prineville’s municipal course.

“Good weather in the fall can quickly make up any shortcomings that we may have had during the summer,” says Lampert.

Slow growth in the golf industry should be no surprise. Nationally, golf has struggled to recover from economic recession, for varying reasons.

So any gain locally should be seen as a success, says Rob Malone, director of golf at Aspen Lakes Golf Course in Sisters.

“In general it seems golf nationwide took a little bit of a hit this year, so though we’d certainly like to have even better results, it clearly could have been worse,” says Malone, adding that Aspen Lakes is up slightly in rounds played compared with 2013.

Tepid growth in the golf industry has little to do with the overall strength of the economy anymore, Black Butte Ranch’s Huntsman says.

Indeed, tourism has seemingly made big gains this year locally. The Central Oregon Visitors Association predicts that 2014 will be a record-setting year in terms of revenue and occupancy rates, and it estimates that Deschutes County’s transient room tax collected in July and August will be up “roughly 15 to 20 percent over 2013.”

Black Butte Ranch has enjoyed significant growth in everything from room nights and food and beverage sales to retail sales. But golf has not followed suit.

The economy aside, Huntsman says family commitments and a diversity of recreational offerings have limited the time vacationers can spend on the golf course.

Huntsman offers his extended family as an example. Visiting for an eight-day vacation this summer, Huntsman’s two golf-crazy cousins managed to play a combined 45 holes, far fewer than what they would have preferred. The cousins spent the rest of their time in the area enjoying some of Central Oregon’s other popular attractions with their family members, none of whom played golf.

Huntsman says that can be overcome in the long term by fostering innovations in the golf business, such as offering shorter six- or nine-hole rounds, and finding ways to ensure that golf is accommodating to both women and children.

“I think there is a lot of opportunity, but it’s a little bit of a paradigm shift on how we approach our marketing,” Huntsman says. “We just have to be willing to adapt and grow with it.”

In the end, Huntsman believes that Central Oregon golf will continue to grow.

But that growth might not be as fast as some would hope.

“We’re just in a real cyclical challenge with golf in the region,” Huntsman says. “But we’ve got a great product and I have no doubt that golf is going to be a successful part of both our business operation and the destination as a whole for a very long time.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7868, 
zhall@bendbulletin.com.