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Growing the game from the ground up
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Dwayne Dillinger, CGCS, doesn’t follow national statistics on golf rounds played. And he doesn’t pore over surveys and reports on the game and its players. But that doesn’t mean he’s not interested in the topic. He’s passionate about growing the game of golf — he’s just more of a grassroots guy.
For Dillinger, superintendent at the Links at Bell Nob in Gillette, Wyo., growing the game is not so much about a grand idea, but a practical response to a need. In the late ’90s, as a father of two young boys, he realized there wasn’t a good place for them to learn to play in their small town. So he and Bell Nob golf pro Kirk Wasson, who also had young kids, began pitching the idea of adding a short, nine-hole course suited to juniors to Bell Nob’s existing public facility. The idea was kicked around for nearly five years before it finally gained momentum in 2003 with grants from the Campbell County Community Recreation District and the USGA Foundation.
With $200,000 in grant money to make the course a reality, Dillinger began logging phone time, calling in favors and soliciting product donations, while he and his crew matched the support they received from the community with labor. Three years later, in the spring of 2006, Wee Links at Bell Nob was officially open for business. And it has been booming ever since.
Junior rounds
“We’ve been seeing 600 to 800 rounds a month (at Wee Links),” the 20-year member of GCSAA says. “Probably 80 percent of the rounds are played by juniors.”
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Juniors only have to pay $2 a day to play.
“The Wee Links is a nine-hole, par-3 course to introduce kids to the game of golf,” he explains of the layout’s mission and price. “It’s also used for beginners, but its primary purpose is to give kids a place to learn and play the game.”
A further incentive is given to juniors in the form of a year-long golf pass that costs only $100 and allows them access to Wee Links and Bell Nob’s regular 18-hole course. If junior players take a rules and etiquette class, their yearly fee is reduced to just $85.
This past summer, Bell Nob hired a college intern in the professional golf management program at San Diego Golf Academy-Phoenix to teach a rules and etiquette class, along with a series of two-week golf lessons that ran from early June to mid-August. Just out of the gate, the program attracted 120 kids.
“We’d have a morning group that would come for four hours and an afternoon group that lasted four hours, and every two weeks we’d start a new session,” Dillinger says. “And at the end of the summer, we held a tournament for all the kids who had participated in the program.”
To extend the Wee Links use and broaden its reach in the community, Dillinger also approached the local school board, which has embraced the opportunity to send students from the town’s junior and senior high schools to play golf at the facility as part of their physical education programs.
Dillinger estimates that the high school’s golf program will benefit from getting kids who have been exposed to the game. In fact, he says there are a couple freshmen on the varsity team who participated in Wee Links’ junior program.
Seeing dividends
Judging by its early success, Dillinger is optimistic about what the program can and will do for the kids in his community, including his two sons, Trenton and Nicklaus, who are now 11 and 12 years of age and taking advantage of having a course to play in their own way and at their own pace.
And though Dillinger isn’t directly involved with the kids that play Wee Links, he says he routinely sees the upside of junior players who are learning how to play the game.
“It’s a great game to learn and enjoy and respect,” he says. “When I see 8- and 9-year-olds throwing the clubs when they miss a shot, or tossing their balls when they miss a putt, my advice is that they’ve got to learn to deal with the emotions of golf. It will beat you up if you don’t.”
As will life, which is just one of the golf and life lessons Wee Links juniors are learning. And the benefit doesn’t stop there. Dillinger says he’s ensuring a better future for golf in Gillette by cultivating future adult golfers.
Wee Links offers a practical perspective, Dillinger says, adding, “When (kids) learn to play the game, they’ll grow up, graduate high school, go off to college and then hopefully they’ll come back and become members of Bell Nob.”
Personal reward
In his 15th year at Bell Nob, Dillinger says he is personally invested in the success of the facility and is excited about the possibilities the Wee Links will afford the community in the future.
“We’ve talked about getting science classes out here, with the Wee Links as more of a classroom for science and nature courses,” he says with enthusiasm. “It’s a possibility down the road.”
Dillinger says he envisions not only the chance to expose young people to the science involved in golf course management, but also to the wildlife at Bell Nob that pays no heed to flying golf balls.
“We’ve got a lot of antelope and sage grouse and foxes,” he says.
For now, however, Dillinger says he is happy just to be able to share the setting with his boys, who are starting to show an interest in the game and what dad does on the course. Which is just fine by Dillinger, a self-professed family man.
“About anything I do is about spending time with family,” he says, whether it’s on the course or off.
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