Businesses all across Iowa are trying to find a way to work through what looks like a continuing problem with coronavirus that may go on indefinitely.
Local 5 spoke to Legacy Golf Club General Manager Trevis Manning about how central Iowa golf courses are adapting to social distancing and focusing on safety.
Local 5 News: Outdoor businesses are doing better than many others. Most people probably assume that's true, but is it true right now in the golf business?
Trevis Manning, Legacy Golf Club General Manager: You know, certain aspects of it have been better. One of those aspects that you know, is lacking is with the group outings and events. We're used to having the over 100 times a year so far during our busy season. We've had one so far this year.
Local 5: It seems like a lot of people are all golfing. Tee times are not that easy to get sometimes, but this is a whole other side of the golf business, these huge corporate outings. How much of your business does that represent?
Manning: Typically it's a big part of our business with the outings and events and the leagues. Those are all things that we count on every year that we kind of cater our business to. And we have that legacy.
But now we've just seen a whole different side of business with regular tee times, public play, really picking up since this started back in March.
Local 5: With the big events that you host, you can put ... 100-150 golfers out on the golf course. But is the problem then when they want to congregate and give out the awards and eat food and have a drink or something like that? Is that where it gets difficult for you guys?
Manning: Exactly, that is the toughest part. Currently, the one outing that we have done, we did just a tee-time start. They were able to grab a sack lunch as they played. And then they just did all their awards and prizes online virtually the next day.
So it is without a doubt ... it is really different. And I think a lot of people are just skeptical as far as you know, what is the right thing to do? It is changing all the time. You know, we do have a ton of precautions and things that we have in place to try to keep people safe. But when you do have large gatherings of people, it's very tough to to keep that space to keep the social distance while following all the recommendations that are in place already.
Local 5: Are you guys still accepting events for the rest of the year and Is there time for golf courses to recover before the end of the year?
Manning: Yeah, I think so. I mean, a lot of the events that we had in obviously in the spring and early summer have all postponed until later in the summer or fall, to kind of get a better sense of where we are. You know, maybe a couple months down the road, you know, some of them have had to cancel, just because their dates were time sensitive, or the dates were date sensitive. So they had to be on a specific day. So they did have to cancel because of that.
There are some events that are still kind of taking the wait-and-see approach to say, 'Well, can we go ahead and schedule something and as we get closer down the road, you know, we'll see if it is doable or not?'
Any events that we do do from here on out, they are going to be different. You know, the social aspect of having everyone there is probably not going to happen like we're all used to. And that may be for a while, we just don't know.