The Lakes at El Segundo presents a extra forgiving view of golf’s guidelines.
Josh Sens
Numerous munis are laidback. Not many handle to be this mellow.
It’s a sunny afternoon on the Lakes at El Segundo, in Los Angeles County, and a beginner to the sport named Andrew Prahlow is trying to find his ball.
Golf is difficult. For each shot that he will get airborne, Prahlow scuffs one other. His play begs forgiveness.
As he searches within the pine straw, Prahlow shuffles previous a signal that gives precisely that.
“Just drop a new ball,” it reads, “and say you found it.”
As native guidelines go, that is lenient. And completely on-brand. It captures the easy-going ethos of the Lakes, the one course within the nation maintained and operated by Topgolf.
Yes, that Topgolf, the outfit higher recognized for its tricked-out driving ranges, with the targets and the tracers and the cocktails and the tunes. Golf gamified and cranked to 11.
In the mid-aughts, when the British-born firm took root on U.S. soil, few business insiders paid Topgolf any thoughts. To the sport’s previous guard, the whiz-bang venues have been outlier leisure. There was golf and there was Topgolf, the considering went, and so they have been in no way the identical.
Fast-forward to the current. The two have drifted nearer on the winds of change.
Even as Topgolf has advanced and expanded, stretching its attain with golf-themed merchandise starting from indoor swing suites to shot-tracing options on event broadcasts, the golf institution has gravitated towards it. Topgolf is now owned by Callaway, and its progressive spirit has moved from the margins to the mainstream. Witness the explosion of brief programs, simulators and digital golf video games, amongst different golf-adjacent diversions. Alt-golf is all the craze. In 2020, in keeping with a National Golf Foundation survey, greater than 12 million individuals skilled the sport at an ‘off-course’ venue, in the identical ballpark because the quantity of people that smacked pictures on an precise first tee.
Here’s how it seems when a muni abuts a Topgolf.
Josh Sens
Not all Topgolfers are golfers, or the opposite approach round. But the info suggests a rising overlap within the demographics.
The Lakes at El Segundo is the bodily expression of a bigger convergence, a beginner-friendly gateway into golf, with high-tech and custom standing aspect by aspect.
The origins of the mission date again about a decade, when Topgolf struck up conversations with officers in El Segundo, a coastal metropolis bordered by Los Angeles International Airport and Manhattan Beach.
The Lakes on the time was like a lot of munis: beloved by many however struggling, anyway.
Cities being cities and enterprise being enterprise, negotiations have been protracted. But in early 2021, Topgolf assumed the lease and launched into renovations. This previous April, work was accomplished, and two venues opened in a single swoop: a triple-decker Topgolf facility, with all the newest technological trappings, and a reborn muni, proper subsequent door.
Under the route of the architect Mike Angus, what had been a 9-hole course with two par-4s morphed into a 10-hole par-3 monitor, with a host of upgrades and up to date add-ons. The Lakes has a new professional store with a restaurant and a bar, plus a new short-game follow space with a number of greens. It additionally has lights, permitting for pre-dawn and after-dark rounds, and out of doors audio system that pump playlists as you play. But no contact is extra Topgolf-y than the additional on the tenth gap, which options a Toptracer on the tee. You can choose out if that seems like an excessive amount of stress. But in any other case, the arc of your shot and diverse stats present up in actual time on a tee-side display screen, simply as they do for Tour execs on TV.
“Just FYI,” a billboard within the backdrop blurts. “Everyone is watching.” Technically, that’s not true, nevertheless it kinda feels that approach.
In the six months since they opened, each El Segundo venues have been going gangbusters, particularly on weekends. Though Topgolf declines to share data on earnings or rounds performed, the joint amenities look like good enterprise. According to report posted on town of El Segundo’s official web site, the municipality anticipates annual internet revenues of greater than $1.7 million.
For now, the Lakes is one-of-a-kind, which doesn’t imply that it will likely be a one-off. So much must line up for a Topgolf muni mission to make sense. Nor does Topgolf plan to shift its strategic focus into golf-course operations, which entails a studying curve practically as steep because the one for golf itself. But Topgolf CEO Artie Starrs says that the corporate is already exploring different related alternatives, together with one other website within the better LA space, the place “we could bring our experience alongside the traditional green-grass experience.”
On this cloudless afternoon in El Segundo, there’s loads of inexperienced grass in entrance of Andrew Prahlow. He’s taking part in the 4th gap, a 130-yarder known as Power Trip (“Do you see those giant power lines off in the distance?” the web course information counsels. “Aim in that general direction.”)
A chill-pill method works nice on the Lakes, which gives extra leeway virtually all over the place you flip. You nonetheless need to execute some difficult pictures, similar to you’d at any course. But the touchdown areas are ample, there’s little tough to talk of and the longest gap now ideas out at 150 yards.
Andrew Prahlow is comparatively new to golf however has discovered a house at The Lakes at El Segundo.
Josh Sens
Prahlow is grateful for all of that. A musician and composer in his early 30s, he took up golf earlier this yr and has logged solely a handful of rounds. He has additionally whacked pictures within the high-tech bays subsequent door. But he prefers the recent air and train and problem of golf in its analog type. The Lakes is a Goldilocks match for him: neither boring nor brutal, offered he steers away from the third gap, which is partly guarded by a pond.
“First time I played it, I lost like six or seven balls in there,” Prahlow says. “So now I just skip it.”
There is not any water on the sixth gap, a 90-yard downhiller the place Prahlow has now arrived. Still, bother in golf is wherever you discover it. Prahlow swings. The consequence isn’t majestic. The ball skitters proper and settles within the grass on the fringe of a hardpan patch of dust and leaves, the place one other signal is planted.
“Didn’t expect to hit it here? We offer lessons.”
Prahlow has been considering of making an attempt these, too.
This marks the return of our Muni Monday sequence, spotlighting tales from the world of city- and county-owned golf programs all over the world. Got a muni story that wants telling? Send tricks to Dylan Dethier or to munimondays@gmail.com and observe Muni Mondays on Instagram.
