Country Club to close Nov. 5

• Country Club

Brian Korthals/Daily Globe The Worthington Country Club is slated to close Nov. 5 amid financial difficulties. Board members are reportedly in the process of working on a reorganization plan.

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WORTHINGTON —Worthington Country Club is closing its doors after 92 years of operations due to an inability to meet financial obligations.

The last day of business for the club is set for Nov. 5. John Koller, board president of the club, said board members are in the process of reorganizing a new business plan and are hopeful to reopen the golf course in spring.

“It (golf courses closing) is nothing unusual — it all comes down to revenue and expenses,” said Koller of the ongoing financial difficulty the club has faced.

“We view the course as a community asset,” Koller added. “A multitude of events are held there — not just tied to golf. It’s a beautiful course.”

Worthington Country Club is not alone in its struggles, a national report suggests. A golf industry report published by the National Golf Foundation in 2009 stated that an imbalance between the number of golfers and golf courses has existed since the mid-1990s.

In 2010, USA Today reported that private club memberships were at 2.1 million — down 900,000 from the peak of 3 million in the early ’90s.

Jim Koppenhaver, president of Pellucid, a golf consulting firm, told USA Today private golf clubs lost from 5 to 15 percent of members in 2009. That loss in membership resulted in, on average, $187,000 of annual dues for those clubs.

It remains to be seen whether the scenario at WCC will play out similarly to one nearly seven years ago in the Minnesota community of Baxter.

Pine Meadows Golf Course, which had a history dating back to the 1920s, was sold by Continental Golf Corp. in 2004 to Denali Real Estate Group of Nisswa following years of substantial losses, according to November 2004 Brainerd Dispatch reports. Community members, at the time, lobbied for the preservation of green space and its operation as a municipal course, but those efforts failed.

To this day, the former golf course property remains mostly undeveloped.

“It started out with some little developments with houses on it, but now they’re abutting a weed patch,” said Marty Rickers, a longtime Worthington Country Club member and one-time board president of the Baxter course. “It was a beautiful course that I played as a kid.

“There are now double-wide trailers on what used to be the golf course property,” Rickers added. “It would be a tragedy to see this happen at Worthington Country Club. I’ve been a member of that golf course since I was a little kid, and it just hurts me to think that it’s going to fail.”

Rickers noted that Pine Meadows closed in large part because of competition that developed from resorts built in the Brainerd area. He sees a parallel in what has taken place in Worthington.

“One of the things that happened here was all this competition from small towns,” he said. “When Adrian opened, it took 35 to 40 members away from our golf course.”

Worthington Mayor Alan Oberloh recalled a golf study the city conducted a year ago that indicated it takes a community population of 50,000 to support an 18-hole golf course.

“We have two courses in a population of 12,000, one in Adrian and right over the county line, another in Fulda,” Oberloh said. “There are ample courses. A lot of people think that (municipally owned) Prairie View is killing the country club, but I don’t think that’s true. Both of them have their troubles, and a lot of it just has to do with too few golfers in a nutshell.

“Generally, golf is down everywhere — as expenses go up, the number of players go down.”

Worthington City Administrator Craig Clark added the city would like to see the number of rounds played — and the number of members increase — at Prairie View Golf Course, which opened in 1982. Whether a closure of Worthington Country Club would bring that result, though, is uncertain.

“I think that some people will probably leave Worthington because it’s their main source of recreation,” said Worthington Country Club member Jeff Flynn, who has been a member for about 25 years.

Would he play at Prairie View? “I don’t know,” Flynn replied.

Fellow club member Jim Lesnar Sr. said that news of the closing is a “tragedy,” but he might continue to golf in neighboring towns.

“I’ve played a few rounds at Prairie View. It’s on top of a hill and very windy,” he said. “I might play a few rounds there, but it isn’t any place I’d like to play very often.”

One major ramification for the city should the country club close is a potential drop in property value, particularly for houses on Elmwood Avenue and Collegeway.

“I would think property value would be affected unless someone figures out how to maintain 100 acres of green space,” Oberloh said.

“As a community member, I don’t like to see any business close,” Oberloh added. “The Worthington Country Club is an amenity that very few communities our size have.”

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