Well, the CGA is among those doing something about prolonged rounds of golf, specifically in its championships. And, so far it’s yielding positive results.

In 2010, the CGA implemented a group pace of play policy for its championships — specifically, those now known as the CGA Amateur, CGA Senior Amateur, CGA Mid-Amateur and later the CGA Super-Senior Stroke Play — and has kept yearly records for each event.

And, of the seven seasons since, 2016 produced the best results regarding pace of play. In fact, the average round in the aforementioned four championships was 22 minutes faster last year than in 2015, with the norm for 2016 being 4 hours and 19 minutes in threesomes.

Over a longer term, last season’s average round time was 13 minutes better than the norm for all the championships from 2010 through 2015.

“For us, it’s incredible news,” said Dustin Jensen, the CGA’s managing director of operations. “You always hear that rounds in tournaments take five-plus hours. But this shows you can play high-end, quality golf in under 4:20. It proves this program works. It just needed a little tweaking.”

Jensen attributes the significant improvement in pace of play to two things: expanding tee-time intervals to 10 or 11 minutes, and more stringest standards at the time checkpoints at the ninth and 18th holes.

Regarding tee-time intervals, the CGA in 2015 used nine minutes for all four of the stroke-play events mentioned. But in 2016, 10- or 11-minute intervals were utilized for the CGA Amateur at Boulder Country Club and the Mid-Amateur at Saddle Rock Golf Course. In the final round of those events — after a 36-hole cut had been made — the average round times were 4:11 and 4:07, respectively.

“A nine-minute interval tends to create an accordian effect,” Jensen said. “Ten or 11 minutes is better (and is expected to be utilized again this year). You add a minute or two on the front end, but you get it back in droves at the back end.”

In retrospect, Jensen said the CGA team learned a lesson from the 2014 CGA Amateur at Lakewood Country Club. The CGA typically did nine-minute tee-time intervals in 2014, but because the first hole at Lakewood is a driveable par-4, the CGA went to 10 minutes. The average round time for the championship that week was 4:04.

“There was no backup with a 10-minute interval,” Jensen noted. “Minor tweaks like that can make a 20-minute difference (in round times).”

As for the second reason Jensen believes pace of play has improved, it’s another adjustment the CGA made for these events. Competitors in the championships can avoid receiving a slow-play penalty by completing their rounds in no more than the designated time par matrix for a given venue. But even if they exceed that time, they can still avoid a penalty by completing designated holes (9 and 18 for CGA events) no more than 13 minutes after the previous group finished them. The change Jensen thinks made a difference was lowering that time in 2016 from the previously-used 15 minutes to 13 minutes.

“Those are the standards used nationally and by the USGA,” he said. “That’s pretty much the gold standard.”

“Players want to play fast. It really comes down to holding people accountable. And people understand we’re serious about (pace of play issues).”

How serious? The CGA does, on occasion, issue slow-play penalties. There were 10 given out in the four 2016 championships, including five in the Mid-Amateur on day 1 at Saddle Rock and four total on days 1 and 2 at the CGA Amateur at Boulder CC — though some penalties were successfully appealed.

Of course, the average round length at championships can be affected by the venue being used. In 2016, besides the CGA Amateur at Boulder CC and the Mid-Amateur at Saddle Rock, the other stroke-play sites were Heritage Eagle Bend for the Super-Senior Stroke Play and the Club at Rolling Hills for the Senior Amateur.

For the record, here’s the average annual round times at these four CGA championships over the last seven years: 4:32 in 2010; 4:34 in 2011; 4:31 in 2012; 4:32 in 2013; 4:21 in 2014; 4:41 in 2015; and 4:19 in 2016.

Given the significant improvement last year, the CGA will go with the same plan in 2017 championships. The association leaves the door open to other tweaks that might speed up rounds further, but officials like the way things are trending.

This year, the schedule for the four CGA championships will be: CGA Amateur Aug. 3-6 at Sonnenalp Golf Club in Edwards, CGA Super-Senior Stroke Play Aug. 22-23 at Buffalo Run Golf Course in Commerce City, CGA Mid-Amateur Sept. 8-10 at Keystone Ranch Golf Course, and the CGA Senior Amateur Sept. 19-21 at Meridian Golf Club in Englewood.
   

Literally.

Two of them, in fact.

Southard, the golf operations manager for the city of Loveland, is not only a local expert regarding pace-of-play issues, but a national one. He teaches a seminar on the subject each year at the national Golf Industry Show. Last week, he conducted a USGA webcast for a group in Montana. And next week he’ll be in Oregon to teach a USGA seminar that’s attended by golf professionals, general managers, course owners and superintendents.

And, of course, there are those books: Mastering Pace of Play While Maximizing Revenue (2010) and Golf: The Complete Guide to Mastering Pace of Play (2013).

Suffice it to say that Southard is a man on a pace-of-play mission.

“Here’s what’s funny: This is so important to our customers, but somehow our industry has dropped the ball on this topic,” Southard said by phone on Monday.

But if Southard has anything to do about it — and he undoubtedly will — that will change.

Since moving to Colorado about eight years ago — and becoming the golf operations manager four years ago — Southard has implemented what he preaches at Loveland’s three golf courses, most notably Mariana Butte and the Olde Course at Loveland.

The result, he said, are midday weekend rounds that average 40 minutes less than they did prior to his tenure, with the norm during those busy times now being about 4 hours, 35 minutes at Mariana Butte and 4:20 at the Olde Course.

Where the Loveland courses used to issue 8-12 rain checks each weekend to people upset with long rounds and slow play, they now issue a very small percentage of that number.

“It used to be really bad. It was embarrassing to drive around the course on the weekend,” said Southard, who cut his teeth as a course superintendent.

How important is this issue to Southard? He estimates he spends 400-500 hours a year working on it, mostly on a voluntary basis. He has seen a dearth of effective strategic information on the topic — be it books, manuals or sharing of best practices — so he’s doing what he can to fill some of the void.

Though Southard doesn’t think USGA efforts such as “Tee It Forward” and “While We’re Young” get to the crux of the issue, he at least credits the association for being one of the first major golf organizations to truly champion a cause which addresses an issue that so aggravates many golfers. (Note: The PGA of America joined with the USGA to launch “Tee It Forward.”)

Southard believes current efforts to speed up the flow of play focus far too little on course operations.

“There’s a lot of things course (management) can control, but one thing we can’t control very well is the golfer,” he said.

For instance, one thing Southard calls “the lowest hanging fruit” in reducing round times is eliminating a widely held practice of having a beverage cart move around the course against the direction of play, stopping groups as it goes. Far less disruptive, he said, is having a parked beverage cart at key junctures of the front and back nine — and never on a par-3.

“We’re the knuckleheads if we can’t see how (beverage carts working backward through the course) affects the flow of play,” said Southard, who estimates that change alone can reduce round times on busy days by 20 minutes.

A key in effectively managing the flow of players around a course is to identify the two or three bottlenecks that cause backups and effectively deal with them, Southard indicated. Par-5s reachable in two or long par-3s often present problems in that regard.

“Pace of play boils down to how long it takes people to leave a hole, on average,” Southard said.

Many of the things that bottleneck play can be controlled from a golf operations standpoint — for instance, not having that beverage cart hanging out on a par-3, a cart-path-only policy on a given hole, a problematic bunker or other hazard on a hole, even a poorly situated restroom or water jug, plus more obvious things like hole location and length. So by making some adjustments, those average hole exit times can be reduced. And saving 30 seconds per group on a given hole can make the difference between continuous flow and constant logjams, even with tee-time intervals from 8-9 minutes.

Besides the beverage cart operations, Southard said another key to reducing round times during busy periods is effectively customizing the tee-time set-up. In other words, don’t have the same tee-time intervals all day or even weekdays vs. weekends.

In the morning, when play is moving faster, the tee times can be tighter. And in the afternoon, when play slows down, spread out the intervals. At Mariana Butte, for instance, Southard said the course will sometimes alternate between seven- and eight-minute tee times in the morning, then lengthen the interval to nine minutes in the middle of the day.

“The industry (generally speaking) does the opposite,” he said. “They’ll have starter times (a tee time purposely unused) in the morning when people are playing faster, then they’ll stop having starter times at 11 or so. So they’ll have fewer (filled) tee times when people are playing faster and more (filled) tee times when people are playing slower.

“Every course in America would be better off (customizing tee-time intervals on busy days). But it’s hard to change the way things have always been done.”

But golfers also need to be trained on having reasonable expectations regarding pace of play, perhaps by an organization such as the USGA, Southard said. For instance, he noted that in a survey Loveland conducted last year, 62 percent of respondents said they should never have to wait on a shot if the pace of play is pretty good.

But, as Southard points out, if golfers are riding in a cart at peak play times, “you’re going to wait (to hit shots into greens). The second part of a hole takes longer to play than the first. That you have to wait in the fairway doesn’t (necessarily) mean slow play. There’s an amount of wait time that’s acceptable.

“There’s a perception that any waiting is slow play. A lot of golfers are just unrealistic about pace of play.”

And, of course, what might be a good pace of play in the middle of a busy day wouldn’t be acceptable in the early morning. So it isn’t realistic — or make much sense — for a course to pin itself down to a certain expectation for length of rounds regardless of the time of day.

Southard became passionate about pace-of-play matters as a general manager and part-owner of a course in Michigan.

“Where I’m from, the season is very short, and you sweat it out in the winters when there’s no customers,” he said. “So you want to maximize the number of people on the course (during the playing season). That means you need to improve the flow of golfers (on the course). That’s kind of a win-win.”