South Eastern Manitoba Golf Course Guide
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008
Golf Course Guide – South Eastern Manitoba - Winnipeg, Manitoba – SCOREGolf
South Eastern Manitoba - Winnipeg Region
Located In:
GOLF COURSE LISTINGS
Possibly the sleeper region for great golf across the entire country of Canada, this region of Manitoba has nearly 90 great layouts for some great days of golf.
ALL SOUTH EASTERN MANITOBA - WINNIPEG GOLF COURSES
GOLF COURSES LISTED: 82
Public/Semi-Private
Private
Southwood Golf Course Winnipeg Renovations
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008
The bulldozers have arrived, but the members at Southwood Golf and Country Club aren’t running — they’re in the driver’s seat.
Eight kilometres south of today’s course as the Titleist flies is where those shovels are making the earth move for a new Southwood on a 297-acre parcel of land in St. Norbert. Work began about three weeks ago.
Some courses have closed, many have been renovated, but this lock-stock-and-barrel relocation of one of the city’s vibrant private clubs is rare and historic. The last such complete move known in Canada was in 1961 in Vancouver, when Shaughnessy moved to its current home.
The real process of changing addresses began more than three years ago and reaches a major milestone with Tuesday’s official groundbreaking ceremony.
The project budget may approach a mind-boggling $15 million. More than $8 million of that will be spent on land and golf course construction, making it Manitoba’s most costly 18 holes ever.
It’s all been made possible because Southwood’s current next-door neighbour, the University of Manitoba, was in the mood to stretch its boundaries.
The U of M is paying the club $10 million for its 110-acre site.
“It’s a match made in heaven,” said Southwood past president Dr. Brian Macpherson.
Southwood’s 400 shareholders and nearly 700 members will be ponying up assessments and extra dues to help finance the project and the club’s board has been authorized to take on up to $2.2 million in debt to solidify the future.
In charge of creating the new Southwood is acclaimed Canadian architect Thomas McBroom, who will move 500,000 cubic metres of earth for a modern major-league course that will range from 5,200 to 7,400 yards.
With plenty of room, a 15-acre practice range and “academy” are included in the plans and another nine holes are designed but won’t be built immediately.
McBroom, who was chosen over 14 other architects, has been given the assignment to replace a member-friendly course with one easy to walk, one that will insist on quality and present a fun, yet challenging variety of shots.
It’s not so easy in one of the country’s “dead flat” zones.
“With modern earth-moving equipment and talented construction guys, no longer is anybody intimidated by flat sites,” McBroom said. “In Florida and Arizona, they’re all flat. I’ve been spoiled with some great sites in my career, but I’m totally bullish on the new Southwood.”
And Southwood seems bullish on McBroom, who is known for his drama, yet playability, when it comes to design.
“Everybody really liked his approach, his integrated vision,” said Ian Shaw, an urban planner and chairman of the club’s project steering committee, who has guided this deal through its most critical phases. “Everybody really liked his perspective on the overall design of the course, his philosophy and how to tie this into the site and its history.”
This linksy-parkland design is McBroom’s first Manitoba work.
“I’m not sure (Manitoba) was ever on the radar screen,” he said. “It’s a mature market and not a growing market. But I thought (Southwood) was well organized and financed and they are pretty smart guys there. They did a great deal with the university. With great people and the right financing, we could accomplish good things.
“In my view, this is totally capable of hosting a Canadian Open. We have length, we have the practice facility, we have clubhouse infrastructure, we have parking and gallery space. I think in terms of where the Canadian Open is going, the folks at the RCGA, if they have the venue, they might love to come to Winnipeg.
“But we haven’t really talked about it because what I’m doing is (building) a club for members at Southwood.”
The target for the first putt to drop is the spring of 2011, although the project has back-end flexibility because the U of M has granted the club three years on the current site, with an option for a fourth if needed.
If the entire project seems a little overwhelming, even indulgent, the members at Southwood might agree. But after their future was exhaustively researched and those findings conveyed to all, several things came into focus.
One of the most critical was erosion of the Red River’s banks, which form the eastern edge of the club’s ninth and 10th holes. Engineers studied the problem and suggested that big-dollar repairs were warranted, all with no guarantees.
Dr. Gord Goodridge, Southwood’s president in 2005, was alarmed that the ninth green was in danger of falling into the river.
“Not on my watch,” said Goodridge, who, despite the can of worms that it was, gets much credit for instigating the serious debate. It was eventually determined that doing nothing was out of the question, so Southwood was faced with a tough choice.
It could spend between $3 million and $4 million to deal with the riverbank, urgent clubhouse updates and some course fixes, though no hole expansion was possible on the relatively tiny 110-acre site.
The other option was found to be no more expensive, maybe less so. The club could sell its land — no easy task since it is zoned parkland — and find a new site to relocate.
“Ask any of us if we prefer to leave here and I believe all of us would say no,” said Brent Kerslake, another past president and project steering committee member. “Members generally live five to 10 minutes away, this is a great location and location is a major consideration.”
With all the homework done and spelled out to them, last June the members voted 98.5 per cent in favour of the move.
There was no shortage of skeptics at the start. What changed?
“I think it was admitting we had some problems here, really getting all the members to realize that reinvesting here didn’t make as much sense as going for something that had a much bigger vision,” Shaw said. “Once they had all the facts, people were able to understand it.”
tim.campbell@freepress.mb.ca
Being a good neighbour
In moving to the very southern edge of Winnipeg on the west side of St. Norbert, Southwood Golf and Country Club will become a neighbour with considerable impact.
Included among the complicated transactions and approvals required to pull off the deal to sell its current 110-acre site next to the University of Manitoba and build a sparkling, new Tom McBroom-designed course on 297 acres, the club says it made it a priority to understand its new neighbours and to plan and act responsibly as their relationship develops.
Close by are a residential cul-de-sac, the Trappist Monastery Provincial Heritage Park, the St. Norbert Arts Centre, City of Winnipeg lands, and a farm (its land vendor). Those groups, as well as trails associations, were consulted, including at public meetings, for its property southwest of the corner of Rue des Trappistes and Rue de Monastere. Here’s what Southwood has agreed to:
No “other” development or redevelopment on its middle land; it’s for nine more holes
Traffic study and measures including directional signage
Investigate the feasibility of using geothermal heat for its clubhouse
Be proactive to facilitate future walking paths and trails along the roads and La Salle River
Provide a 20-metre buffer along Rue de Monastere to proposed course entrance
Share its roadway and infrastructure improvements
Respect the character of the monastery ruins site just to the east, including moving its clubhouse site south to reduce impact on traditional sightlines
Style of buildings will reflect the character of the area
Protect the nearby oak grove that contains a stone of apparent historical significance with a conservation easement
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/sports/topstory/story/4186504p-4776688c.html
Winnipeg Auto Finance
www.glendalegolfs.com
Radisson Resort Hecla - Hecla Island Golf Course
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008
This is definitely NOT an oxymoron. Carlson Hotels Worldwide’s new, unique Radisson Resort Hecla
is part Costa Rica eco-adventure, part Caribbean beach resort, part Florida waterpark with a three-story indoor waterslide, part European spa, and part fabulous cuisine. This spectacular island retreat on Lake Winnipeg was inspired by Nordic traditions, embodying the essential elements of rock, water, ice, fire and wood –– and bringing them together in a feast for the senses. Here, guests can conduct business, play golf, enjoy nature, maintain a healthy lifestyle, or simply relax.
An island getaway with a uniquely Canadian landscape.
The 90-room Radisson Resort Hecla is located on a pristine island within Hecla/Grindstone Provincial Park, just two hours north of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Surrounded by Lake Winnipeg, the 10th largest freshwater lake in the world, Hecla Island gives its visitors a taste of the coast in the middle of the continent.
First settled by Icelanders in 1876, Hecla Island is a haven for golfing, fishing, hiking, biking, skiing and snowshoeing. Visitors can also enjoy a number of beaches, historical sites, kayaking and other outdoor activities.
The Radisson Resort Hecla even has an on-site naturalist who has developed a number of fantastic adventures for guests to enjoy during their stay. Seasonal ‘One Day Wonders’ run the gambit from exploring areas that only the locals know, to snowshoe adventures to snake den safaris.
Link to Map and Directions Hecla Island Golf Course
Manitoba Vacation Cottage Resort
Sphere: Related ContentGreener Way
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008
I’ve got to admit I was skeptical. I guess I’ve gone on too many press trips where something billed as an “eco hike” turns out to basically a walk in the park (I packed hiking boots for this?) or a “green resort” is just one where they do a bit of composting and urge guests to hang up their towels if they don’t need washing every day.
So when I was told that I’d be seeing Canada’s top environmentally managed golf course in Manitoba, I didn’t expect much. I figured that to sustain those beautiful greens, all golf courses needed to be water-guzzling environmental drains that rely heavily on pesticides and herbicides to maintain an unnatural ecosystem.
I was wrong.
Clear Lake Golf Course, in Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba, is as beautiful a course as you can imagine. Emerald green fairways tumble between tall evergreens and roughs of wildflowers border perfect greens.
But this is a course that runs on solar power, biodiesel and compost - loads and loads of compost.
Perhaps the most out-there features on the course are the composting toilets. They use no water. Red wriggler worms break down the human waste into liquid fertilizer that can be sprayed on the rough and solid bits that can be added to flower beds. The toilets come from Clivius Multrum, a U.S. company owned by Abby Rockefeller, who happily calls herself the back sheep of the Rockefeller family.
“We’ve calculated that we save 300,000 gallons of fresh water a year by using these toilets,” says Greg Holden, course superintendent. “When you think about it, it’s a real waste to use three to five gallons of water to flush away eight ounces of human waste. But the best part is that we’re using waste as a resource.”
In the 16 years that Holden has been caring for the course, that’s been his guiding goal: using stuff that could be treated as waste as a valuable resource.
Food waste from the pro shop, the clubhouse restaurant and the snack shack is composted along with 2,000 pounds of clippings that are collected off the greens each week. (The clippings from the fairways are left in place, to provide mulch and nitrogen for the grass and soil.)
“The food waste and clipping are a huge source of lush, green nitrogen, then we mix them with leaves, twigs and straw - basically anything brown, even unbleached paper products - for carbon,” says Holden. “We turn the mixture every week and end up with 6,000 to 7,000 pounds of finished compost per year. We’ve turned waste into a resource. We could use way more compost on the course than that, but we’ve made an 85 per cent reduction in what goes to landfill just by composting.”
Holden has also arranged to pick up the used cooking oil from 13 area restaurants, drive it to a processing facility, then uses the biofuel to power his mowers and other lawncare equipment. The golf carts are all electric.
When Holden first arrived at the course, his goal was to meet the standards of the Audubon Co-operative Sanctuary Program, with measures such as wildflowers in the roughs.
“A golf course can be a wonderful habitat for wildlife,” he says. But in the years since, he’s down far more. “We’ve now gone leaps and bounds beyond the Audubon program.”
Holden is the first to admit that not all has gone smoothly. He had to close down the composting area for a year when area bears began to treat it as a breakfast bar.
“The bears were becoming habituated to the compost,” he says.
With the help of a park superintendent, a bear-deterring electric fence was put up around the area.
To augment the compost made on the course, Holden ships in composted poultry litter from Ontario, a mixture of bedding, straw and poultry droppings. He tries to time applications with forecasts of rain, to wash the compost into the lawn and soil.
“One time a few years back we put it on just as a beautiful warm rain was beginning. We sat back and thought this is going to be beautiful. But then the rain stopped, leaving all this gloppy, muddy stuff on the greens. Golf balls picked it up as they rolled, with a snowball effect. Golfers got it caked on their shoes in great big clumps. It was a nightmare. All we could we could do is apologize and hand out plastic bags.”
Despite of a few setbacks, the course is seen as a huge success - valued by golfers for its velvety greens and by environmentalists for its green initiatives.
While he isn’t telling anyone to get red wrigglers in their home bathrooms, Holden says home owners can easily adopt some of his successes to their urban lawn care. “A home lawn is so small, it should be very easy to manage.”
Here are Holden’s Top 5 lawn-care tips:
1. Don’t expect perfection: “That dark, dark blue-green lawn is probably not very natural. Take a look around you, at the colour of the leaves and what’s around your site and try to make your yard fit in. There’s always going to be a weed seed that flies through the air or a bird that drops one on your lawn. Try to achieve a natural balance.”
2. Use your nitrogen resources: Mow your lawn at a higher height. “Let the clippings fall on the lawn, returning the nitrogen to the soil.” Also, instead of brown bagging yard waste, compost it, so you can return the nitrogen-rich material to your lawn (as a top dressing in spring or late fall) or dig it into flower or vegetables beds.
3. Fertilize intelligently: “Pick an organic fertilizer. Composted poultry litter is good because it has a low middle number, the phosphorous. Lawns use the nitrogen (first number) and potassium (third number) efficiently, but phosphorous can leach into nearby water, causing problems.
“Also, spoon feed your lawn. If it says to use so much fertilizer, divide that into four to five applications, so if you get big rain, the fertilizer won’t all wash away.”
Holden says that on the golf course, he also sprays with a very dilute molasses mixture after fertilizing because the sugars “excite the microbes in the soil” letting them break down the fertilizers. Dissolve molasses in warm water, then mix into a watering can or spray. Five ounces of molasses to 10 gallons of water is plenty.
4. Aerate: “If you can, aerate your soil because it creates little channels for air, water and nutrients to penetrate into the soil. Then fertilize after aerating. For most home lawns, even the aerating sandals will work. If your yard is very compacted, you’ll want to get an aerator that pulls the plugs right out.”
5. Use corn gluten once or twice a year: “Hand pull weeds, but once you’ve got them down to manageable level, use corn gluten. It’s a fertilizer, but it also suppresses weed seed germination. It suppresses all seed germination, actually, so don’t use it on newly seeded lawns. By fertilizing, you get some fairly vigorous growth so the grass can compete with the weeds.”
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/life/story.html?id=9fd1b5d9-7e50-403a-9496-9a5472224b8f
ebay Import Car Canada Transport
Sphere: Related ContentCan You Change the Weather for Golf in Manitoba
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008
It’s time to either fix or stop weather forecasting. It’s so bad, it’s beginning to hurt commerce.
My friend Kathy Kennedy, the newscaster, at 92-CITI-FM, received a nasty e-mail from a local golf course operator last week. The operator was righteously pissed off, but he didn’t know who to blame, so he blamed the woman he listens to every morning.
K.K. was taken aback, a little shaken by the vitriol, but she knew it wasn’t her fault. She receives weather reports from the federal government’s weather agency and reads them on the radio. That’s all. That’s why the federal government MUST do something about Environment Canada.
Either fix it or shut it down.
Weather forecasting has become so insanely bad that if you believe a word of what you hear in the media, you are (a) too gullible to live or (b) just as nuts as the weather forecasters who will actually tell you they’re right most of the time. And believe me, many of those clowns truly believe they’re doing the public a service. Truth is, they’re seriously hurting commerce in this country and they should be stopped.
Or they should actually make an effort to get it right.
This past week, we saw the commercial impact of tremendously bad weather forecasting. Our angry golf course operator complained that Enviro-Guess Canada’s prediction that it would rain all day on Wednesday and Thursday cost him more than $3,000 in lost revenue. People were told it would rain all day – both days — decided not to play golf.
Of course, we know that on both days, the weather was absolutely perfect. I played at Steinbach Fly-In on Wednesday with Jimmy Toth from Shaw TV and Ken Wiebe from the Sun. It was a great day and the weather was absolutely sensational.
However, as we sat with the Fly-In’s greens’ superintendent, Rob Fast, afterward, he lamented the fact that play at the public golf course had been limited this spring, not so much because of the rain but because of the prediction of rain.
“It’s been really slow,” Fast said. “When you keep telling people it’s going to rain all day, they find other things to do.”
This spring, the attendance at Winnipeg Goldeyes baseball games has been down. Granted, there have been some cold nights this spring and while the tickets have been sold, folks are staying home. However, on far too many occasions, people listen and watch the weather reports and decide to avoid sitting outside at the ball game because they’re told, “there is an 80 per cent chance of rain.” And, far too often, there is no rain at all.
I’ll be the first to admit that weather forecasting is an inexact science, but it’s reached the point here in Manitoba that it’s so inexact it’s not even a good guess anymore. The people who foist this bullshit on us must be stopped.
I call the play-by-play of Goldeyes games on television and like most of the front-office staff I spend hours gazing at Environment Canada’s internet radar screen. I have come to the conclusion that no one — not one person on the planet — can predict weather more than 45 minutes in advance. Anyone who suggests that long-term weather forecasts are accurate are either TV weather stars, who are paid far more than they’re worth, or people who are simply delusional.
It’s time to stop it! Weather forecasting is so inaccurate, so often, that it is hurting commerce in Canada, especially in the Central part of the country. Ultimately, it is theft disguised as information.
http://www.rivercitysportsblog.com/its-time-to-either-fix-or-stop-weather-forecasting-its-so-bad-its-beginning-to-hurt-commerce/
http://www.rivercitysportsblog.com/
Sphere: Related Content