Arranging For A Golf Trip
If the members of your golf group are varied in their golfing ambition, you should not have a mandatory schedule that you enforce on all the members of the group. Allow the members to go at their own schedule. Instead of trying to squeeze in as much golf as possible, some of your older members might feel the desire to sleep in, eat a nice breakfast, and read the paper before hitting the courses. The younger members might be excited to get up at the break of dawn and hit the course right away in order to warm up to it.
Therefore, you should always discuss what exactly each group member is expecting from the trip. If you can group people with similar desires together, you will be able to split up the people who are more die hard and those who are looking for nothing but a relaxing vacation. As long as you find out before hand, you won’t have any unpleasant shocks when the actual day of golfing comes and half of the group wants to leave at 4 AM and the other half wants to sleep until noon.
If your golf reservations and plans don’t quite allow for such flexibility with the daily schedule, then perhaps you should do a little bit of member elimination in order to get a group together that has similar desires. I am sure that if you tell one of the members that he is welcome to come but won’t be able to sleep in really late, he won’t be offended. It’s simply a matter of what is possible with the current situation. He can choose to either stay at home or get up early.
Even though it is good to set ground rules before hand, it is equally good to be flexible with your schedule. If a few of your members want to take the afternoon off to go sightseeing or to a museum, then you should not feel like they are abandoning you and your plan. The goal of a plan, after all, is not to restrict your activities but rather to guide them. With a plan in mind before hand, you won’t end up with a completely empty day and no idea of what you are going to do. Always let your group members know about what exactly the plan is before hand, and all of you should be satisfied. Always be open to suggestions, and your trip should be flawless.