Crowd Pleasers How TPC Scottsdale Hosts Half a Million in a Week (And Plenty the Rest of the Year, Too)

It all starts with the attitude that no expectation—from tournament attendance projections to the needs of individual players or groups—is too much to handle.

by Joe Barks (editor@clubandresortbusiness.com)
March 2008
 

TPC Scottsdale at A Glance • Golf Courses: Stadium (44,000 annual rounds) and Champions (58,000; previously called Desert). • General Manager: Bill Grove • Head Golf Professional: Greg Wolf • Golf Course Superintendent: Jeff Plotts • Director of Instruction: John Stahlschmidt • Director of Sales & Marketing: Tiffany Nelson

At first glance, it appears to be just another typical customer thank-you letter, like you’ll often find framed or put into binders for display in clubs’ management offices. It’s from the Special Events Manager of a school for the hearing impaired, and is addressed to TPC Scottsdale, the 22-year-old property outside of Phoenix that is owned by the city of Scottsdale and operated for it by PGA TOUR Golf Course Properties.

“This was the first golf tournament I ever organized,” the school administrator wrote, referring to a charity event she had arranged to hold at TPC Scottsdale. “While it was unfortunate that it had to be cancelled by the weather, I still wanted to write to let you know that everyone, and especially your Tournament Coordinator, Jill Varichak, was extremely helpful. Even during the FBR Open, Jill continued to be available to me and our golf committee to answer our questions.”

That’s when it sinks in—this is hardly your typical thank-you note. Not only was the customer compelled to write in about an event that wasn’t even held, she praised how the club’s staff attended to her needs during a week when over half-a-million people were swarming over the TPC Scottsdale grounds as part of what ranks, by far, as the wildest golf event scene any property has ever had to manage.

Everything Super-Sized
This year’s FBR Open was watched on TV by many club managers and course superintendents as they gathered across the country in Orlando for the Golf Industry Show, which was held over the same weekend. As they saw the pictures of 25,000 screaming (and often well-lubricated) spectators leaning out of skyboxes to unnerve the likes of Phil Mickelson on the 16th hole of TPC Scottsdale’s Sta-dium course, industry professionals had two common reactions: 1) What would Bobby Jones think? and 2) How can a course—and its staff—possibly stand up to this kind of stress?

Actually, TV doesn’t come close to capturing either the magnitude of the scene, or the challenges behind it, reports Jeff Plotts, TPC Scottsdale’s Golf Course Superintendent. “The 16th, by itself, becomes a small city,” he says. “It’s amazing—it’s a 163-yard, par-3, and on that one hole you have more people than you could fit into USAirways Arena [for a Phoenix Suns game], or that would go to an LPGA tournament for an entire week.”

Billed as “The Greatest Show on Grass,” the FBR Open, won this year by J.B. Holmes, now draws 25,000 people to the Stadium Course’s famous 16th hole alone and never sells out, despite attracting over 500,000 for the week.

This year, the FBR was held during the same week that the Super Bowl was in Glendale, on the other side of Phoenix. Despite atypically cold and rainy weather during the beginning of the week, and a significant dropoff (because of the Super Bowl) on Sunday compared to previous years, this year’s total attendance of over 538,000 set a new record, helped by a new single-day record on Saturday of 170,802 attendees.

But here’s what may be the most impressive figure of all: The weekly total was only a record by less than 2,000 people. TPC Scottsdale, in fact, has been handling tournament crowds in the half-million range since 2002. Weekly attendance for the tournament (previously called The Phoenix Open) started at 186,000 in the first year it was held at TPC Scottsdale (1986). It jumped over the 300,000 level two years later, and has climbed steadily ever since.

One vital part of the club staff’s prescription for minimizing tournament-related stress, in fact, is that everyone makes it a point to actually plan for even greater hordes. “We were ready for over 200,000 on Saturday,” says Tiffany Nelson, the club’s Director of Sales and Marketing. “We had 100 skyboxes at the 16th, but were ready to have 100 more if needed.”
Another important key to TPC Scottsdale’s ability to make it through a tournament of this magnitude—as evidenced by the thank-you note from the school administrator who had the cancelled event—is the staff’s ability to treat the FBR as really nothing more than their busiest week of the year.

General Manager Bill Grove sets the tone for a staff that tries to treat handling half a million people as just their busiest week.

“Sure, we always have a bit of an emotional meltdown on Sunday when it’s over,” says Bill Grove, TPC Scottsdale’s General Manager since 1991. “But between the extra temporary staff we’ll hire for that week, and the help we get from The Thunderbirds [a Phoenix-area, Kiwanis-type organization that coordinates huge armies of tournament volunteers], we really do try to make it as normal a week as possible for our regular staff. While it’s always nice to break [attendance] records, we want to be prepared to handle whatever we get as ‘standard procedure.’ ”

“Beyond the value [this approach] has for not burning anyone out,” Grove adds, “it also sets the right tone. We really need to approach an event like this as just one very big part of all the things we do here year-round—and at the same time, always remember that all of the other smaller, day-to-day things are just as important, too.

“Besides, let’s face it—if you’re not ready for something like this well in advance, you can forget it; it’s not going to happen.”

Don’t be surprised if TPC Scottsdale’s Golf Course Super-intendent, Jeff Plotts, fails to show much sympathy for your stories of event-related course damage.

Worth Keeping Up?
From a course-management perspective, getting ready for and then recovering from the FBR has actually become so drawn-out, the thought of not taking down all of the scaffolding, skyboxes, bleachers, signage and other tournament-related trappings now merits serious consideration.

From the time everything begins to get put up to when it’s all put away is now every bit of a six-month process, Plotts reports. His annual budget now includes $40,000 just for patching all the holes left in the turf by bleachers or poles and repairing all the curbs and cart paths that get destroyed by trucks coming on and off the course during buildup and takedown.

“You don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Plotts says about some of the damage he discovers. “You just have to be prepared to replace everything as you come across it.”

Everyone can’t play like the pros, but Director of Instruction John Stahlschmidt is helping TPC Scottsdale visitors learn like them.

Factoring not only these hard costs, but also all of the added labor that’s involved, into a cost-benefit analysis begs the question of whether it might just be better to leave everything up. And then there’s the marketing value that can be gained from retaining the “FBR feel.” For weeks both prior to and afte the tournament, daily-fee golfers clearly enjoy the added fun that comes first from walking up to the Stadium Course’s 16th tee through the players’ tunnel, and then getting a taste of what it’s like to drive and putt in the closest thing golf has to Fenway Park. There would certainly be some added revenue to be gained as well, if signage and other aspects of sponsorships were left in place year-round.

Moving On to Next Week
But beyond practical considerations (“Every-thing really starts to get weathered if you don’t get it taken down and put away before summer; the desert heat is brutal on everything,” says Plotts), the bigger reason for taking everything down is that letting the FBR dominate the property too much, and for too long, would once again conflict with the balanced, even-keel approach that the TPC Scottsdale staff strives to maintain.

Bill Grove, in fact, says that “one of the finest compliments I was ever paid” came when he was showing two visitors around the TPC-Scottsdale property on the Tuesday after a previous year’s tournament, and it dawned on him that they hadn’t yet asked about what had taken place on the property the previous week.

Head Golf Pro Greg Wolf runs pro shops that would win performance and merchandising awards even without the yearly boost they get from demand for “I Survived 16” t-shirts.

“I asked them, ‘Do you realize what all was happening here, as recently as Sunday?’” Grove relates. “They then remembered, and were blown away to see that we were that organized, to already be as much back to normal that quickly.”
Part of the secret for making such a relatively transparent transition to and from an event of such a grand scale, while minimizing the impact on everyday golf, says Plotts, is an approach that calls for “building it up from the outside in, and taking it down from the inside out.”

“We also document everything extensively and use aerial photos that are taken for us each year [see example, pg. 18], to help identify and work out things that can be changed and improved,” he adds. “We also make sure we have a meeting, no matter how tired we all are, on the last day of the tournament, to set priorities for the next year.”

“Our vision was to provide public golfers with a PGA TOUR-caliber course,” says designer Randy Heckenkamper of TPC Scottsdale’s new Champions Course, which opened last fall to replace the property’s original second course. A new 11,000-sq. ft., desert contemporary-style clubhouse was opened for Champions earlier this year.

Because of all of these techniques and the experience accumulated through the years, Plotts says, the record-setting 2008 FBR Open, with the slight added complication of being conducted for the first time with the Super Bowl in town, still ranked as “probably as smooth a tournament setup as there’s even been here at this facility.”

Champion Mentality
Letting the presence of the FBR linger too long can also detract from the many other things the TPC Scottsdale property has to offer on a daily basis. Its newest star attraction is its second course—formerly known as the Desert Course, but renamed the Champions Course after a full renovation, directed by course designer Randy Heckenkamper, was completed last fall. The Champions layout also includes a new 11,000-sq. ft., desert contemporary-style clubhouse, with F&B and pro shop outlets that compliment those in the main Stadium Course clubhouse.

As the Desert course, TPC Scottsdale’s second layout was just that—a low-cost, high-volume alternative to those who didn’t want to pay to play the Stadium Course. Now, while rates for Champions are still mid-range ($43 to walk and $68 with a cart), the club hopes to generate new, year-round buzz by combining the improved challenge of the course (Heckenkamper calls it “not your typical resort course”) with the unique marketing propositions that are emphasized at all TPC properties.
“Forty-seven percent of people who come to play golf here do so because of word-of-mouth,” says Grove. “We’ve been successful in moving that up from 38 or 39 percent—but we can and have to do better, especially with what we see right now as very cautious [economy-related] expectations for 2008. The people booking group business [for golf outings] are very guarded right now; we are seeing them hold off in some cases to book their events in less than 30 days, where in better times they’ll do so two years out.”

Awesome Experience
To help convince those groups that they should not only go ahead and book an outing, but do so at TPC Scottsdale, Grove and his staff are seeking to sell the special sizzle they feel they can now offer through the combination of two quality facilities that have a strong connection to the Tour—and not just any Tour event, but the one with the hottest rock-concert status.

“[The FBR] has given us the opportunity to create great expectations [for potential golfers and groups]—but it also puts pressure on us every day to not only meet those expectations, but exceed them,” Grove says. “What we have going for us here is that we can make it possible for average players and fans to do something they can’t do in any other sport.
“You can wear the same jerseys as professional players in baseball or football or basketball, but you can’t go play in the stadiums they play in,” he explains. “But here, you can come and wear the same clothes as your favorite golfer, use the same ball and same clubs that he or she does, go to the same locker rooms, and play the same courses.”

The TPC Scottsdale staff is now putting a premium on blending PGA TOUR experience and expertise into all aspects of what’s offered on the property. “A lot of our instructional curriculum comes from what the best players in the world are doing,” says Director of Instruction John Stahlschmidt. “We’ve taken what we’ve learned from tour pros and included it in our approach to what we see as the four cornerstones of improvement: instruction, custom club-fitting, mental conditioning and physical conditioning.”

On the retailing side, because customers want to look like the pros as well as play like them, Head Golf Professional Greg Wolf uses that same access to insider knowledge to maximize the effectiveness of the merchandising mix in TPC Scottsdale’s pro shops (one in each clubhouse) and continue the run of Top 100 Shop and Merchandiser of the Year accolades that have been earned since the property opened. (Wolf also gets special benefit from the FBR madness, which ensures steady demand for “I Survived 16” t-shirts and other variations on the theme.)

Like other TPC properties (C&RB, August 2007), TPC Scottsdale is also upgrading its caddy program (for both courses, with caddies mandatory on Stadium) and creating a volunteer network of “storytellers” to be available throughout the property, not only to help guide and inform guests, but also impart course lore (including the almost-Biblical “moving of the rock” by fans for Tiger Woods, during the 1999 tournament).

“Phoenix is now the fifth-largest city market in the country,” Grove notes. “And the FBR really kicks off the golf season for the entire valley. So yes, that all gives us a great start and a great opportunity for momentum that can go far beyond what any other golf course has.

“But that certainly doesn’t mean we don’t have to do anything the other 51 weeks,” he continues. “If anything, it makes it more important to create programs that will help us find new markets, attract different segments and increase our exposure to both the local and national customers and prospects who are finding out who we are.

“With the physical improvements we’ve made to the Champions Course and elsewhere, and especially with the economic outlook we’re facing now, we also need to find ways to do more to turn that into a strong upselling program for the people who come here, whether or not it’s their first time,” Grove adds. “I’m always amazed at how the concessions companies are so good at getting the 16- and 17-year-old kids in the movie theater chains to ask you for 50 cents more when you make your popcorn order. Here, we can do a lot more than just give more popcorn than you want—we can enhance an experience that’s already unlike any you’ll ever have, and when we do, you’ll still go away talking about what a great value it all was.”