What Makes Bolingbrook GC The Talk of the Town

In just five years, a mayor’s vision has become a vibrant center of activity—not just for golf, but also dining, meetings and social events.

by Joe Barks (editor@clubandresortbusiness.com)
October 2007
 

Bolingbrook GC AT A GLANCE • Year Established: 2002 • Annual Golf Rounds: 27,000 • Clubhouse Size: 76,000 sq. ft. • Annual F&B Revenues: $5 million • Number of Members: 140 • Employees: 225 in-season; 125 off-season • General Manager: Terry Hanley • Director of Food & Beverage: Laura Cray • Executive Chef: Brad Elston • Director of Catering Sales: Tamara Jordan • Head Golf Professional: Mike Williams • Golf Course Superintendent: Jeff Gerdes • Director of Sales & Marketing: Michele Gavaghan • Management Company: KemperSports

It’s 9:00 AM on a mid-week morning, and a man is in the elevator of the clubhouse at the Bolingbrook (Ill.) Golf Club. He’s headed for the upper-level ballroom and the start of the second day of a conference of government transportation officials trying to hash out solutions to traffic problems in the Chicago area—and he’s in the kind of trance that usually comes with being in an elevator before another all-day meeting.


But after noticing the nameplate of the club’s General Manager, Terry Hanley, who is also riding up to the second floor, the man comes to life.

“This is really a tremendous facility—how long has it been here?” he asks Hanley, starting an enthusiastic conversation that continues as they walk toward the 900-person-capacity ballroom. “I didn’t know anything about it before yesterday. But I have to tell you, the reception and dinner last night were great, and everything else has been fantastic, too. And it’s owned by the town, right?”

Five years since the Village of Bolingbrook, a suburb of 70,000 located 40 miles southwest of Chicago, opened Bolingbrook GC in 2002, it’s still being discovered virtually every day as a property that goes well beyond your run-of-the-mill municipal course. Some realize this as they come into town and see the signs that point the way to the club, as one of the village’s landmark attractions. For others, it comes when driving up to the 76,000-sq. ft. clubhouse, or entering its impressive lobby. And if none of this is enough to let you know you’re at a different kind of city-owned daily-fee, you’ll certainly get the idea once you go into one of Bolingbrook’s many top-shelf meeting or dining rooms.

Make no mistake, there are also excellent golf and amenities to be found on the 220-acre property—from the challenging Arthur Hills-designed course, to the expansive practice/in-structional facility with 70 hitting stations and 12 bentgrass target greens, to the 2,200 sq. ft. pro shop (see photo, pg. 50), attended locker rooms, and other first-class appointments evident throughout the clubhouse.

Bolingbrook Mayor Roger C. Claar (LEFT) and KemperSports’ Terry Hanley, Bolingbrook GC General Manager, have teamed up to help make the property’s 76,000-sq. ft. clubhouse, and all it contains, a familiar landmark—and frequent destination—for Chicago-area golfers and diners.

But as conceived and developed by Bolingbrook Mayor Roger C. Claar—who pushed through the bond issues needed to fund what turned out to be an estimated $50 million project by stressing how development of the course and property would help with stormwater management for the village—it was critical from the start to make sure that Bolingbrook GC would become much more than just another municipal golf course.

The motivations behind this were “purely political,” Claar freely admits. “If you just

Through a strong casual dining offer in The Nest Bar & Grill, Bolingbrook has developed regular local clientele that extends far beyond its golf offer; 75% of its lunch business is non-golf-related.

build a golf course [with public funds],” he explains, “there’s only a small percentage of the people in the community who will use it, no matter how great a course it might be. But if you make sure it has good restaurants and also becomes the place that everyone thinks of first when they want to have meetings or proms or weddings, then it truly becomes a community property.”

Already, the club has become established enough as a part of the village that 140 memberships have been sold through various corporate, family, social and golf packages. Bolingbrook residents also get discounted golf rates for daily use of the course, and Claar, Hanley and Head Golf Professional Mike Williams are satisfied that the right percentage of the club’s 27,000 annual rounds are coming from locals, whether through a membership or just as “members for a day.”

“We will never be a [fully] private club, even though that’s what a lot of people assume when they drive by or come in and see what we have,” Hanley notes. “At the same time, we will never put up signs that say ‘Open to the Public,’ or get into things like 2-for-1 tee times or food discounts, either. We think we can continue to do very well with the right balance [between the two approaches].”

Executive Chef Brad Elston consistently serves 30 to 40 covers, including $41 osso bucco, in the fine-dining East Room, open four nights a week.

East Room

Food With a View
The real validation that Bolingbrook has become a true community gathering point comes through food and beverage and catering activity that has already reached the point where 75% of the club’s lunch business is non-golf-related, two weddings are booked for both Friday and Saturday nights throughout the year, and sold-out Mother’s Day and Easter brunches serve the 1,400 people who make their reservations before the waiting lists get started.

Overall, F&B has grown to a $5 million-plus annual operation at Bolingbrook GC—enough of a success story that Director of Food & Beverage Laura Cray was recently given the assignment by Kemper-Sports Management (which has operated the club for the village since it opened, and recently had its contract renewed) to move into a National F&B Director role for all Kemper-Sports properties.

“Our approach from the start has been that we are in the food and beverage business first, and we just happen to have a very nice golf course in our backyard,” says Cray.

Golf course operators in general—and municipalities in particular— “definitely underestimate the amount of food and beverage business that any property can do,” Cray believes. “We had $2 million [in catering business] on the books before we even opened the clubhouse here.

“The potential is always there for doing a lot more than just serving golfers at the bar,” Cray says. “If you have good service and good food at a good value, you can quickly make yourself a very attractive destination to businesspeople, housewives looking to meet their friends, and all other parts of the community.”

Director of F&B Laura Cray has had such success developing the club’s $5 million F&B operation, she’s now going national for KemperSports.

The Bolingbrook team also never bought into the notion that it had to be limited to casual dining in a daily-fee setting—it consistently serves 30 to 40 covers a night in its East Room fine dining setting, which is open Wednesday through Saturday nights and features appetizers like crawfish gratin, escargot and mushroom tarts, along with a full menu of steak, seafood and chop entrees. The highest-priced entree, Southern Italian-style osso bucco ($41), has become a “mainstream” East Room favorite, according to Executive Chef Brad Elston. “It was slow starting off,” Elston says, “but once we got people to try it, it’s always stayed on the menu.”

Osso bucco at $41 is a long way from the usual daily-fee snack shop fare—and it may just be the beginning in Bolingbrook, if Mayor Claar has as much success bringing the next parts of his vision to life. Plans are already in the works for a second, 18-hole golf course in the village called Big Stick that will be built around an existing 80-acre recreational lake and measure an eye-popping 8,400 yards (fittingly, John Daly is on board as a consultant).

Claar also doesn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t then be able to attract a big-name resort hotel to the area and put Bolingbrook on the map as a premier destination for meetings and events drawn from throughout the country.

Public funding for the course was secured by promoting its value for stormwater management in the area; seven lakes were dug as it was built, and 14 holes have water.

“Convention centers are played out,”Claar believes. “But golf courses can be combined with the right types of hotels and resorts to be very attractive, not only for meetings from outside of the area, but also for events tied to the community.
“When you also think about how [courses] can help to preserve open space and serve community-wide purposes like [Bolingbrook GC] did here for stormwater control, it really becomes a win-win—and you can get a lot of the course to pay for itself,” Claar adds. “But unlike a lot of municipal courses I’ve seen—and actually some that have been privately owned—I don’t think you have to cut corners or ‘go cheap’ to realize that return.

“I’ve think we’ve shown here that you can do even better by doing everything first-class. And when you do it that way, it’s something everyone can really be proud of—even if they never come here to play golf.”