Forget about gazing at green meadows and prepare to see homes and maybe a strip mall or two in the coming years when you drive by a chunk of property just outside the northeast edge of the city.
Indeed, that was part of the problem.
People drove by instead of stopping in and taking their drivers out at Meadows at East St. Paul Golf Course, which is closed for business due to fewer golfers and too many choices of courses in Winnipeg and the surrounding area.
Peter Ewert, president of Meadows and also the director of golf at Larters at St. Andrews, said the dwindling numbers of golfers each season since the 18-hole public course opened 15 years ago made it impossible to continue to operate the business.
“You’re running into a situation where the golf courses that are available to the public, there’s just too many,” Ewert said. “There’s really a need for almost two or three more to go down until you start getting people actually now getting back up to the number of rounds that they used to have.
“The number of rounds being played at most of these courses are 10-15 per cent down from where they used to be, and that’s from a business perspective, that’s where budgets need to be. It’s really a numbers game.”
Privately owned Meadows hosted its final players in late October, although the sale of the 185-acre parcel of land near the junction of the north Perimeter Highway and Lagimodière Boulevard hasn’t quite been finalized.
A developer is planning a residential neighbourhood, with some of the site earmarked for commercial purposes.
“The decision was made a couple of years back, when things were starting to look grimmer as far as the golf industry is concerned and the number of rounds we were beginning to have,” Ewert said. “There just wasn’t the appetite for shareholders to continue down that road if it wasn’t going to really improve.
“And I think that’s sort of the state of the industry in Winnipeg. There’s a lot of golf courses and there’s not necessarily enough people to go around. That became the gist of what we had to decided to do. A developer was interested in property in East St. Paul, and the two ideas came together.”
