Beyond The Baselines Ed Shanaphy

Hospitality runs in the family. Alexandria LaRocca, Director of Member Engagement at The Beach Point Club in Mamaroneck, New York, and Matt Assumma, who served at Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, join the podcast. And, they’ve known each other for years, and we mean for years, since they were kids.















Alexandria and Matt are both offspring of well-known and highly regarded club managers, having grown up in the industry. Their respective backgrounds highlight how important both human resources and hospitality are in the private members club industry.







Ocean Reef Club And Gaining Membership Through Visitation







Matt spent eight years at one of the leading clubs in the country, Ocean Reef. He notes how he worked his way up through the ranks from banqueting and ended up working in the membership department, where he would flag visitors who may have visited the club more than twice in five years, but who had not expressed an interest in gaining membership. Membership plays such an important role at any club through events, such as outings and member guests, but for a iconic club on the tip of Key Largo, perhaps new members can be even more significant.















Ocean Reef, although a private club, can be seen as a destination with both a conference center and an inn on property. Matt notes the friction that can be caused between hosting events, attracting new members and the tradition of a small, fishing village which was the dream of its founder and present-day members, according to Assuma.







Member Communications







LaRocca notes that although email is very strong, different messages require different timings and different avenues of communication. Tennis, food and beverage, and timing of delivery all affect how communications are received by her elite and private membership at Beach Point Club. She realizes that with the numerous clubs in the area, a director of membership really is forced to know the entire brand – not just the activities at the club – but the brand that is the club’s identity. That identity separates the club from its many competitors, especially in the Westchester/Fairfield county areas of New York and Connecticut.







The Pros and Cons of Living On Property







Assumma lived on campus at Ocean Reef for a year before he, for the first time in his life, commuted from a property off campus during his time in the industry. Housing can attract great talent, especially since many may be on J1 or H2B visas, states LaRocca. But, there are times when living on property can be difficult. Your thought process may be that you can never be “off duty” or a member might find you late at night as they might need their clubs for an early-morning flight, as has happened to Assumma.















In looking back at their respective careers, it's clear that perhaps the hardest job one might have in the private members club arena is running a dining room. With that said, both these individuals started doing that as teenagers working with their fathers, and food and beverage is clearly a life-long love as well as a wonderful way to learn the club industry from the inside out.

Two major seasonal jobs have just one director: Brett Gaede. From his first ever, post-college professional position at the renowned Nantucket Yacht Club, Gaede has made New England and Florida his seasonal homes, and follows his members, and the sun, up and down the East Coast.















With his two director roles, he lives with water views year-round, and has views over the Atlantic almost two thousand five hundred miles apart, depending on the calendar. Gaede is the director in the summer in Maine on the remote Mount Desert Island at The Harbor Club. A very private club, hidden in the gem of a village called Seal Harbor, made famous by the ultra-private Rockefeller family back in the early 1900s. At his winter post, where he serves the membership as director at the elite Hillsboro Club, just outside Ft. Lauderdale, Gaede works with an older demographic and a club that is etched in tradition with its tennis and croquet professionals in all-white clothing from head to toe.







Pine Trees In The Summer, Pine Trees In The Winter







Famed Testa's Restaurant in Palm Beach, Florida in the winter had a sister restaurant also on Mount Desert Island in Maine. Nick Testa Senior formed a motto: Pine trees in the summer, palms in the winter. That's exactly how Gaede thinks as he spends evenings enjoying the scenery of Acadia National Park in the summer and views of Hillsboro Inlet in the Broward County, Florida through the winter months. Gaede could have used that motto to describe his life over the past 15 years. Funnily enough, Testa's in Bar Harbor is just minutes away and in Palm Beach just about 30 miles from his winter nest, as the proverbial crow flies.







As the director that has "racquets, and will travel," Gaede takes us through his tips of creating a great seasonal program. Housing is crucial to help find and retain great instructors and assistants at such "destination" clubs. Second is the meal plan or benefit. Third comes, perhaps, the commission as the millennial employees look for comfort in not only their food, but their life and living and having a work/life balance.







Tournaments Are Losing Popularity - Clinics The New Club Competition







Gaede has seen trends away from tournaments to live ball and pro-fed clinics, especially at Seal Harbor. With an older demographic at Hillsboro and a more transient membership in Florida with rooms at the inn as part of the club, he feels that the trend will soon arrive in Florida too. It may already have. He is packing all courts at both clubs each morning with Cardio, Liveball and 105 and attendance over 40 on a daily basis. Tournament entries are weaker each year, and he explains his thinking as to why pro-fed clinics are here to stay as the leading weekend entertainment.







Have a listen to perhaps one of the best seasonal directors in the country. He says he's happy where he is now. We aren't surprised: he has two of the best seasonal jobs in the nation. Brett Gaede on the Beyond The Baselines Podcast.

It's not easy to engage members twelve months a year in the cold, frigid air of Canada when your only amenity is golf. Ash Chadha, general manager at Glencoe Golf And Country Club, is bringing members to the club in bigger and bigger numbers through various methods, even in the dark winter months. Offering a warm welcome through a cold winter is just how he does it.







Glencoe, established in 1984, was an outlier of its sister club, the downtown city club, Glencoe, in Alberta, Calgary. The idea of being open twelve months a year had started just before Covid. As the city boundaries grew toward the 45 holes of golf – the club boasts just golf and food and beverage – and Covid created a bigger demand, opening in the heart of winter was different.















Ash speaks with the experience of being a long-serving club manager with over 15 years of senior management work under his belt. For eight years he was a department head – a food and beverage manager - and his work as a general manager is often seen through the lens of his department heads, a position in which he personally learned to thrash out ideas before presenting them to upper management.







Chadha has brought in comfort food – burgers, chili, and fish and chips – for the membership throughout the winter and with the ever-popular NFL, even in Canada, on the televisions and fires lit in the fireplaces, he keeps his membership engaged. He’s brough in hiking, ice skating and other wintry events to keep the members engaged. “That’s all we really want as managers, isn't it?,” asks Chadha. Then he answers his own question: “Members using the club in some capacity.” Even in the cold of a Canadian winter at a golf-only country club.







Visibility Is Crucial For Management







Chadha admits that the year-round effort does put pressure on the staff. Ash holds weekly staff meetings, along with one-on-one meetings with the department heads on a regular basis. Visibility, he says, is just as important for senior management with the team as it is with membership. However, the key objective, he says, is not to interfere with their specialty or their side of business, and as a general manager the main task is to provide support and be available to staff and membership.







Club Governance Can Easily Be Inherently Conflicted







Nominating committees at Glencoe have largely filled an administrative role in the past. More and more, many clubs are moving to nominating committees that are actually soliciting for members to fill voids on the board. A shift to this more business like practice might take a generational shift, says Chadha. It takes trust and transparency, Chadha believes, as members aren’t always trusting of the board to choose their own successors, or even a nominating committee to perform that role. Chadha says it may be easier and wiser at this point if a group of members from outside club governance bodies nominate a particular individual.







Bylaws and policies also present a big challenge in that the member perception is that the board really owns the opportunity to choose their replacements, and that makes it rather hard for the membership to accept a nomination.







“I know the big firms like KKW and GGA are promoting that clubs be run like a business, but from a corporate governance standpoint, the challenge in our business is there is an inherent conflict between the boards, and the membership, and the non-for-profit institutions they are responsible for.”







Learn at both the day-to-day and the long-term strategic levels from this industry leader who caters to over one thousand principal members and 3,200 individuals at Glencoe Golf and Country Club.

This could be the best conference in our industry. It may be the biggest. It was the largest, according to the organizers, in over twenty years. The PGA Merchandise Show reached new heights this last week of January, 2024 with more vendors, more club managers and more industry leaders. And, we at BeyondTheBaselines.com were there to cover it all: the conference, the speakers, and the vendors.















From new releases on the golf, tennis, pickleball, and the retail fashion side, the conference offers those in the club management and private members club industry a chance to meet, greet and learn from each other in ways that were probably unimaginable twenty years ago. With educational seminars, social gatherings both inside and outside Orlando's Orange County Convention Center, and vendors lining up to sell to the industry's buyers, the PGA Show is second to none in the industry.







We sat down with Jennifer Gelhaus, the newly appointed Director of Racquets at the famed Oyster Harbors Club in Osterville, MA and discussed just how the golf and tennis industries are similar but, also, quite different in respect to marketing, communication and retail.







Join us as we have a coffee in the lounge just outside the enormous exhibition halls which had hundreds of rows and thousands of vendors. Where will this growth in fashion and retail, pushing the booths of the tools of golf and the nine irons to the side, leave the industry? Live at The PGA Merchandise Show - we have it, and you, covered.

Already a Top 100 course in the nation, The Tree Farm was a vision of a PGA Tour Player back when it was a deep, dark and dense tree farm owned by a timber company. Looking to fully open its doors in September 2024, The Tree Farm is hoping to become not only a destination, but is also hoping to change how we might envision a golfing experience.















The dream of PGA Tour player Zac Blair, The Tree Farm, a private club in Batesburg-Leesville, South Carolina, is just twenty-five minutes away from the revered Augusta National. Although Blair may have had some of the same desires as Bobby Jones had when he designed Augusta, Blair does not envision a major championship at The Tree Farm - he just wants the members to have fun and enjoy their game of golf. Simple. Just like the club's logo.







Zac's dream started back in his native Utah, but when he was down in South Carolina with friends, he saw the property and started digging in - not earth - but his heels. He and renowned club manager, Eric Dietz, have set up a club to fully open in September, 2024. And, they have both gotten their hands dirty in creating a project that is cutting edge for the golf and club industries.







Tom Doak, famed for his minimalist style, was perhaps the perfect choice to route the holes on the property that Blair wants to keep as the focus. Doak already had six courses in the Top 100 and studied under Pete Dye, while perhaps his biggest influencer was Alistair McKenzie. McKenzie of course studied under Bobby Jones. Blair then brought in his good friend Kye Goalby to finish the design - Kye had worked with Doak previously on several projects and was the best choice for finishing the ultimate design, says Blair.















With 70 founding members, raising $35 million to help jump-start the project, Dietz and Blair know all 320 members. The two men are already well on their way to filling the 370 memberships at what will surely become one of golf's most desirable destinations. Blair has interviewed each and every member while Dietz welcomes them to the club, a club that is not steeped in tradition like past clubs he has managed, but is warm and welcoming to all levels of golfer.















The Tree Farm revolves just around golf - there's no other real amenity. The clubhouse - the architect is a personal friend of Blair - is being designed and outfitted with the surroundings and natural, local environment in mind. The lodging is being built around an idea - Blair and Dietz call it "a lunch to lunch experience" - 24 hours, 2 rounds, 2 lunches, and 1 dinner to be enjoyed before departure.







This idea of a course as a destination drawing members from miles away for a day or two, or even more, is a growing trend in the industry. With Streamsong outside of Tampa perhaps as the first of this kind, developers and financiers are finding large tracts of interesting land and building courses as destinations for day-trippers through to those looking for weekend getaways and week-long stays. Golf in Scotland, say at a Machrihanish or even further out like a Machrie, may have long before been destinations - and Blair and Dietz are using that model created long ago here in South Carolina, about as far from the Isle of Islay as one can get.







"The course should be the star," says Blair. It's the course as to why people will want to come and visit. At a full-length of 6,900 yards and par 71 from the back tees, it's open and accessible for every level of golfer to enjoy and play. Listen in as Eric and Zac take us through their initial conversations and how they are creating a global destination from the land of an old timber company.

Isabella Graf moved to the United States from her native Germany early in life. She may be a shining example not only of proverbial "American Dream," but also of the experience and education available in the private club industry, where she is fast becoming one of its leaders.







Chosen to be a regional leader for the United States Professional Tennis Association and Head Professional at The Landings in Fort Myers, Florida, Graf is looking to become a mentor in her own right after learning from so many.







As a graduate of the Professional Tennis Management (PTM) program at Methodist University, and with three internships under her belt, one for each summer through her collegiate years, Graf believed, she was well prepared for the industry. That was until she realized that member relations, not teaching, is at the heart of our industry. Those internships at the clubs, she says, were crucial to her development just as much as her work in the classroom and understanding stringing techniques.















Standards and character are what Isabella looks for when hiring. She realized early in her career that these were the two traits required of a leader in the hospitality business, and through her own self-reflection and discipline, raised the bar for herself, personally. And now, she looks to these traits when raising the bar for a racquets program and while hiring to fill positions to bring that program to a "best-in-class" status.







Graf is going places and understands the industry far better than many of her more senior colleagues. Listen in as she explains how she looks to be a mentor in her own way, not just to other female teaching professionals, but to all in the business of member relations.