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Golf Lotteries, Course Closures, and other golf thoughts
+ News, Notes, and weekly favorites
Sean Melia
November 07, 2025
Hey Everyone,
Last week, I played the back nine at Wellesley CC for a Ouimet Scholarship Fund feature called “It’s Time Ouimet.”
Kevin Padron, a Ouimet Scholar caddied for me. I interviewed him about his life and path to Worcester State. An incredible, inspiring story. It was a great experience, and the video should be out in about a month.
Also, I drove down to Cape Cod CC for an Open House that PureSky Energy hosted. They walked people around the property and explained the upcoming solar project that is only a few votes away from becoming a reality. I wrote about that on Monday.
If you’d like to help support the Friends of Cape Cod CC, I am donating the proceeds from the sales of my “Save Cape Cod Country Club” shirt to them. They have been working to bring attention to the potential sale and closure of the club.
Finally, I managed to sneak in a round of golf this week at Berlin CC. What a cool nine-hole course.
News and Notes
Pro Golf
🔨 Michael Thorbjornsen is down in Mexico for the World Wide Technology Championship. He shot 66 in the first round and is “check notes” five shots off the lead. Nick Dunlap and Sami Valimaki both shot 61. Sheesh. Live Scoring
⛳️ The LPGA is out in Japan. Megan Khang, Alexa Pano, and Brittany Altomare are all sitting it out. Only a few events are remaining in the season. The top 60 players get into the LPGA Tour Championship. Khang sits in 30th place right now. But Pano is 100th and Altomare is 159th.
College Golf
College golf has wrapped up, and I compiled a rundown of all the Massachusetts Division 1 team results from the fall. I also tracked Massachusetts players who compete for colleges outside of the Bay State. It’s all here.
Amateur Golf
🏆️ Kevin Blaser won his second Cape Cod Amateur at Hyannisport last week. He beat Sam Russell in the final. Brian Seccia won the Senior Division.
🐴 MassGolf announced that GreatHorse will host 11 championships in the next 8 years.
2026 New England Am
2027 Mass. Open
2028 Mass. Four-Ball
2028 New England Senior Am
2029 Mass. Mid-Am
2030 Mass. Amateur
2030 Tri-State
2031 Griscom Cup
2021 Mass. Junior Am
2032 Mass. Girls’ Junior Am
2033 Mass. Open
Plugs
Posted my October Recap yesterday.
Some Musing About the State of the Game
It feels like the ground is slowly shifting under the game of golf. Maybe it feels like that because I’ve been paying close attention to the Cape Cod CC sale. But there are other things that have popped up on my radar over the last few weeks that have been clanging around in my head.
Here’s a bit of what’s been on my mind.
Courses closing or going private
While CCCC is very much on the ropes, Maplegate CC (Bellingham, Mass.) and Atlantic CC (Plymouth, Mass.) are both on the same path to becoming solar fields. I’m not sure if some of this process has sped up because tax breaks are ending. It seems like projects that start before July 4, 2026 will still be eligible, after that it gets a little tougher for companies and individuals to acquire those tax breaks.
So the rush is on, and three public courses in Massachusetts might be gone. 54 holes in the blink of an eye. I have reached out the Maplegate and Atlantic to get the latest info on their future, but have yet to hear back. Maplegate has been living off the “it’s our last year” campaign for two years now.
In addition, Cape Club of Falmouth is slated to become a private golf course, so now that’s 72 holes that would be eliminated from the public. 54 holes in the Plymouth and Falmouth area, gone.
Up in Vermont, an excellent public destination, Montcalm GC, is looking to become private again. It was once private and was opened to the public a few years ago.
Remember what Cape Cod CC owner Brian Friel said in 2021… “The expansion of golf courses on the Cape over the past decade or two and the reduction in the number of golfers nationwide has forced me, from a financial viability standpoint, to consider other land use options for the Cape Cod Country Club.”
He could have less competition in 2026 if he kept the course open and tried to find a buyer who would like to keep the course intact.
Stow Acres has also seen a big change. Nine holes are gone on the North Course, and a double-decker driving range sits in the middle of the property.
The Stow Acres model could be a great pathway to get people into the game. They can go from hitting shots at the range to playing nine holes to playing 18 holes.
But overall, there’s a real possibility that by July 5, 2026, 63 holes of public golf will be off the table.
Bandon and resort golf lotteries
Since last January, Bandon Dunes has had a lottery for tee times and rooms. They break the year up into chunks, and players can pick what lottery they’d like to enter based on the time of year. Then they hold lotteries throughout the year. I’ve come up dry in all six of the lotteries so far between all of 2024 and the two they’ve done so far in 2025.
At this point, tee times for 2027 (yes, 2027…) have been given out for January-May with two more drawings for the rest of the year. The June-October and November-December lotteries will happen later this year.
Now, these bookings are for lodging. If any sicko wanted to take a chance at getting a tee time while staying close to Bandon Dunes, it’s a possibility. But if you’d like to stay on property, it’s going to take a lottery win to do it.
Even golf companies like Fried Egg are offering events at Bandon Dunes, but those spots are also handed out through a lottery.
On a recent Fried Egg podcast, Andy Johnson and Henry Shimp talked about the possibility of new resorts popping up closer to urban areas. Rodeo Dunes in Colorado is just 45-60 minutes from Denver. An easy trip to a stunning piece of land. Maybe the influx of more of those resorts spreads out the demand, and lotteries disappear. Or at the very least, the lottery might be easier to win?
In addition, I think there is something to be said for the public golfer who would like to be a private member but can’t because of waitlists or exorbitant initiation fees. So those golfers have been using their cash for a trip instead.
If you live in Massachusetts or New England, there’s no easy golf trip to take. Pinehurst and the North Carolina sandhills are probably the easiest trip. Turning Stone is probably the easiest road trip for park-and-play golf.
According to the National Golf Foundation, private golf is booming, too.
“The latest rounds report, through September, revealed that private golf play was up more than 5% nationwide relative to September 2024. By comparison, public golf play was up about 1%. The trend was similar in August (+9% private vs +7% public) and July (+6% private vs +2% public).”
To me, this means more golfers, and younger golfers, are joining private clubs. They are playing more than older members, too.
The next 2-5 years will be very interesting in this space.
Golf on YouTube. A wide variety.
Over on YouTube, there were three distinct videos I watched that highlight the wide net the game can cast.
Mike and Eli, the co-hosts of the Chasing Scratch Podcast, filmed their Final Major, a match that helps them put a cap on their podcast season.
The show is in its 8th season, they do some YouTube content, but it’s mainly a podcast that highlights the challenges of golfing with a family and job, and mental demons as they try to get to scratch handicaps. They started at 11 handicaps in the first season.
They are saccharine sweet at times, two buddies who met in college and have the same pop culture IQ as many elder millennials. They built an incredible following, so much so that people will travel to watch these two 5 handicap golfers play golf in person. They have Titleist sponsoring them and fitting them out for the newest gear almost twice a year. It’s an incredible story.
This year’s final major was special because Eli had a hip replacement and couldn’t play last year.
The crowd is substantial, and the banter is fun and low-stakes. They seem to attract genuinely good people and have built a community based on inside jokes, movie references, and golf.
The match ended on the 17th hole. Mike and Eli had their caddies play the 18th hole. The video ends with the two talking about how much fun they have and how grateful they are for their fans. The last words of the video are, “Hey everyone, drinks are on us!”
On the other side, Riggs and Kirk Minihane of Barstool Sports had a match at Granite Links in October. Barstool is a heavyweight compared to Chasing Scratch’s status on the Internet. The Granite Links match was also well attended. They advertised it and built up the drama over their airwaves. Minihane was left out of the Internet Invitational (more on that in a moment) and felt slighted (he probably would have showed up for a 9:30 tee time, to be fair…).
Just look at the thumbnails for these two videos…
At one point, Minihane shoves one of the fans after making a birdie putt. One of the few highlights for him during the ass-whooping he received. Riggs and Minihane both scream after making 8-foot putts. Fans and players talked shit and pushed the limit.
The match was a pillow fight, full of hunting for balls in the fescue, reteeing after hitting shots into hazards, and peacocking on the rare occasion the golf ball did what they wanted.
It felt like those two videos sat on opposite sides of the spectrum. Mike and Eli spend all year grinding over their games, trying to get better, and battling their demons. Riggs and Minihane spend their time shit-talking and screaming at each other and the fans. There didn’t seem to be any joy or fun at Granite Links. Maybe Riggs and Minihane would try to convince you they were having fun competing, but it sure didn’t look like it.
In the middle of the spectrum is the Internet Invitational, a massive, head-spinning undertaking that has four videos out on YouTube right now. 48 golf influencers competing for $1.7 million at Big Cedar Lodge. It felt like YouTube golf’s version of the Avengers. All these disparate entities coming together to compete.
Obviously, it’s intense because there’s a lot of money on the line. It’s a wide variety of players, from PGA Tour winner Wesley Bryan to a waitress at Big Cedar Lodge who filled in for J.R. Smith because he missed his flight.
There’s some healthy shit-talking and over-the-top celebrating, but there’s also a fun aspect to it. The second episode features a nine-hole alternate shot competition that is really interesting to watch. Players are grinding. Some of the competitors don’t play a lot of golf on camera, like PFT of Pardon My Take.
They all admit to feeling nervous. They hit bad shots. They hit great shots. They leave their partner out to dry. And they bail out their partner.
It’s all there. And it should be all there because it’s 48 golfers being filmed for hundreds of hours.
Two of the three videos left me feeling good.
Mike and Eli’s friendship is aspirational. The Internet Invitational was an easier watch than I thought it would be. Of course, it generated the usual Internet hate, but as a viewing experience, it’ good so far. We’ll see what happens when the money is really on the line and things get tense in the next few episodes.
LIV Golf falls in line
LIV Golf is back in the news because it decided to add 18 holes to its revolutionary 54-hole format. Now it looks… a lot like the PGA Tour. All that brim and bluster about a fan-friendly 54-hole event. However, it wasn’t so friendly to the world rankings of guys like Jon Rahm.
But don’t think that the rebellious league of badasses is just moving closer to the status quo…
Here’s what Bryson Dechambeau had to say:
“Everyone wants to see the best players in the world competing against each other, especially in the majors, and for the good of the game, we need a path forward. By moving to 72 holes, LIV Golf is taking a proactive step to align with the historic format recognized globally. This is a fantastic evolution of the LIV Golf product, showing how our League listens and adapts to create the best possible experience.”
A “fantastic evolution.”
Would you expect anything less from The Scientist?
I’m surprised they didn’t go to 81 holes or something just to stand out from the pack. Would that have been dumb? Of course. Would it have been on brand. Yup.
Now, their tournaments will run from Thursday-Sunday. Another fantastic evolu-
never mind…
After LIV stepped away from the bargaining table with the Official World Golf Rankings (OWGR), it seemed like LIV was content being a breakaway league that provided its players a lot of money but no world ranking points.
Over the last few months, more and more LIV players are playing in non-LIV events to earn points or snag spots in the majors. Tom McKibbin won on the Asia Tour last week and earned a spot in The Masters and The Open Championship.
Some of the big stars on LIV are also running out of major exemptions, which generally last five years.
DJ won his Masters in 2020. Brooks Koepka won the PGA Championship in 2023, so he has a bit more time. So does John Rahm, as he won his Masters in 2023. Patrick Reid is out of exemptions, aside from his forever invite to Augusta.
Guys like Tyrrel Hatton are always grinding for major berths. And amateurs have to think twice before going from college to LIV if they have no real status in the professional game.
And then there’s the Ryder Cup and the possibility of guys like Rahm not playing in Ireland because of a standoff between the DP World Tour and LIV Golf. Rahm won’t pay his fines for playing on LIV. With how great Luke Donald has been, the stable of captains for Europe is primarily connected with LIV. Graeme McDowell is the latest to try and put his name in the ring for a future captainship.
Anyone who played golf and followed the game before 2020 would be surprised by all the sections above. It’s been an incredible half-decade and growth, and now as the money continues to pour in, people will have choices to make on the business and personal side of the sport.
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When I’m not golfing…
I’m reading…
📖 Working through my Ethan Allan and the Green Mountain Boys book. An interesting look at the Revolutionary War on the Vermont/New York/Canada border.
I’m listening to…
🎼 Forgot how much I liked Phoenix. Hard to believe that their album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is 16 years old.
I’m drinking…
☕️ I was forced to hop around Charlestown this week because of some work being done in the apartment. I stumbled in PixlCat, a cafe down near Sullivan Square. I had an Espresso Tonic. I might never be the same.
🍸️ I had a Sunburnt Negroni at Lolita this week. Delightful. Love a good Negroni.
I’m eating…
🇲🇽 Had dinner with some friends at Lolita in Fort Point. Insanely good shrimp tacos and the white crab dip was one of the best things I’ve had this year. They also give you shaved ice (with an optional tequila addition for free) when you are seated and cotton candy at the end of the meal.
🥪 After my morning at Wellesley CC, a follower recommended I pop into Volante Farms for a sandwich. Had the smoked turkey. The market is awesome. Grabbed some butternut squash soup for dinner, too.
I’m watching…
🐇 Black Rabbit is very good. Stressful, but very good.
🐎 Slow Horses wrapped up last week. Again, go watch it.
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