By Indiana Thompson
Big Fish Golf Course Manager
It was a year of unprecedented success for Big Fish Golf Course. Many businesses had to battle through the COVID-19 pandemic this season. Luckily, golf was an industry that thrived through the pandemic. Since opening the course on April 24th, we have seen never before growth and rounds played. I have talked to many of my peers in NW Wisconsin, and they have said much of the same words. We believe that COVID will likely have a beneficial outlook for golf because guests are most safe when they are outside. It is critical to provide a healthy activity for people to do outside, ad golf happens to be that activity!
I saw many new faces at Big Fish this season. It is interesting to note that these faces have not only come back once, but twice, and sometimes more! We are a destination course, which means we do a lot of once a year, daily fee, payments. We only see most faces once a year, but now we are seeing them much more than we used too! This is great, and with the course in excellent shape and currently ranked 14th in the state for best courses to play per Golfweek Magazine, we are sure that our growth can be sustained for the future. Peers in the area and I talked about the sustained growth. We all decided that we don’t expect future years to be like this, but numbers should still be much higher than average.
Moving to the numbers. As mentioned earlier, our course saw unprecedented growth. We saw growth this season of 43% on total rounds. To put that into numbers, we are at 17,320 rounds this year compared to 12,100 last year. This is an increase of 5,220 rounds! The industry average for our region was growth of 4.3%. We beat that ten-fold! Revenue increased about 33% compared to last year as well. Many people took advantage of our off-peak pricing this season, as tee times were steady from open until close. This resulted in a smaller net revenue per round, but that is to be expected since tee times were booked all day! The rounds played in August and September were records for Big Fish, along with our overall rounds played. Our final net profit was also a record as far back as I can remember! It was exciting to see this course thrive like it did when it opened and now see it become even better than when it began!
I want to commend our staff with valiant efforts this season to fill in where possible and those who stepped up to the plate and went above and beyond to provide the best experience possible for all patrons! This season was a success because of our tremendous staff. Our team is second to none! I also want to thank the TGB for their support of the course, especially during these trying times!