Curtis Labelle

Head Golf Professional

Legends on the Niagara

Niagara Falls, Ontario

Service with a Smile

Niagara Falls is perhaps Canada’s greatest natural wonder. The region has also suffered some very unnatural setbacks the past decade. First came the 9-11 disaster that tightened up border crossings between the United States and Canada. Next came the economic collapse, and the re-emergence of the Canadian dollar against its U.S. counterpart.

The result: fewer visitors to Niagara from south of the border. This double whammy has filtered down to the golf courses owned by the Niagara Parks Commission. Its Legend on the Niagara facility (two championship courses – Battlefield (Doug Carrick Design) and Usher Creek (Thomas McBroom), plus a nine-hole gem and a golf academy), has been hard hit as U.S. business dried up.

But Curtis Labelle, head professional at Legends on the Niagara, can see a slow turnaround in fortunes, and he’s optimistic that this golfing playpen will continue to serve its government bosses, and the taxpaying public.

If Legends on the Niagara is unique, so has LaBelle’s career path been to his present position. A native of Belleville, Ontario, he started his golfing life as a backshop worker at the Bay of Quinte Club in Belleville under the guidance of head pro George Balazs.

He got his first assistant’s job there before finishing off his apprenticeship at the St. Catharines Golf Club, just a stone’s throw from Niagara.

Both Balazs and St. Catharines head pro John Irwin taught LaBelle the value of good customer service. He also learned that to be a good pro you have to have an intangible quality: the ability to read your members, and react to their needs. “Golf is a selling game,” says Labelle.

He joined North America’s oldest golf course, the 9-hole Niagara-on-the-Lake Club (1875) in 1991, and stayed there for a decade. He served the small membership (250-300) by implementing new programs, re-introducing tournaments and social functions, and generally making a name for himself as one of the area’s top professionals.

He joined the Niagara Parks Commission (a branch of Tourism Ontario) after that, and took over as head pro at Legends seven years ago.

He’s been a TaylorMade adidas staffer for a number of years, and Legends is a preferred vendor. “I like the innovations that help the average golfer,” says LaBelle, referring to TaylorMade’s line of hard goods.

LaBelle is also impressed with TaylorMade’s Penta golf ball, and highly recommends it to his customers. Legends also has 50 sets of TaylorMade rental clubs that are replaced with new ones each year.

Although Legends is a government-owned facility, it’s very much run like any other business – driven to give quality service to its customers. It’s the way LaBelle has always approached his job as a professional. A philosophy he learned early in life.

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