R.I.P. TeeMaster

No, you didn’t miss the announcement… TeeMaster isn’t officially dead yet… but it won’t be long.

I booked a tee time at www.teemaster.com last weekend… one of my golf buddies and I had just enough time to squeeze in 9 holes so I booked a round at Glen Lake.  I hadn’t been on the TeeMaster website in awhile and was a bit sad to see what a ghost town it has become.

Remember when TeeMaster was the bomb?  Back in the day, there were 70+ Metro Area courses listed on TeeMaster and it seemed I could book a tee time on a very high percentage of the courses I wanted to play… it was very quick and convenient.

Now there are only 21 Minnesota courses listed and about half of them are exec or par 3 courses.  When I tried to click through to check availability on several courses it didn’t return any available tee times… it was as though the connections were no longer active even though the courses were listed.

Why do I care?  Why should you care?

For golfers, TeeMaster offered a level of service and convenience enjoyed by golfers in very few parts of the country.  If you don’t think that generated some additional play, then you haven’t tried to book a tee time lately.

And TeeMaster’s business model was very course-friendly… course operators could participate in the TeeMaster network for a modest annual fee even if they didn’t use the TeeMaster tee sheet service.

Alas, the franchise is now in tatters… the software was never updated to make it mobile-friendly which renders it unusable for most golfers today.  TeeMaster is a closed system that never opened up communications with other tee sheet systems… most operators aren’t interested in manually transcribing tee times from emails into their tee sheet systems and dealing with double bookings.

The national 3^rd party tee time booking sites (GolfNow, TeeOff.com, Golf18, etc.) haven’t fully replaced TeeMaster in the hearts and minds of golfers because their business terms don’t attract the critical mass of courses that TeeMaster attracted… for example, only 6 of the top 40 public golf courses in the region are listed on GolfNow.

I suppose we could just sigh and move on, but I’d rather not… especially when there’s an opportunity to create an even higher level of convenience and service for golfers and an even healthier value proposition for golf course operators.

That’s the essence of the Marketing Co-Op being prepared for launch in 2019.

Maybe instead of “Remember When” we’ll soon be chanting… ‘the king is dead, long live the king’.