New way to play courses you like!
Photo by Cindy Burnham – The Fayetteville Observer
Legacy Golf Links GM Chad Derusseau displays his website that searches for courses.
Eddie Southards – “Find A Golf Course To Play”
The Fayetteville Observer
Golfers heading out of town who want to find a course to play now have a new tool on the Internet.
It is courtesy of Legacy Golf Links General Manager Chad Derusseau, who has developed a golf course fitting system.
Golfers can go to golfcoursefitting.com and type in the kind of course they would like to play. The characteristics include style, layout, length, difficulty and how much sand and water the course has. There also is a filter for location and price or the name of a course. Derusseau, working with his mother Carolyn, has analyzed golf course layouts across the nation and has assigned each course what they call a Tee-To-Green Personality score. “I’ve been in the golf business for about 16 years and I’ve been frustrated when I’ve tried to find a golf course to play,” he said. “There’s a need for golfers to find a course and understand its playability in a much simpler way. “For example, if you are coming to Pinehurst, you don’t have to go to 20 websites. We make it simple and easy.”
Derusseau, who has been at Legacy for 11 years, got the idea for the system while he was working on a paper for his Masters degree. He and his mother created the system to analyze courses, then hired a company to build the computer software. Derusseau launched the website in April and then added a Facebook app in June. “It’s starting to get some traction since we added Facebook,” he said. “People are getting excited about it.”
He also started a program on Facebook called “Play Like The Pros Weekly Golf Challenge.” He publishes the Tee-To-Green Personality of the golf course the PGA Tour is playing each week. Users of the app can then find a golf course near them that matches the Tee-To-Green Personality of the tour course.
The project is a work in progress. Derusseau has about 2,100 courses in the system now but he is aiming for 10,000 to 12,000. “That would make it really robust,” he said. “The idea is to make this a revenue-generating business through advertisements. We need to raise capital through investors to complete it.” Derusseau’s goal is to get golf courses to embrace his concept and publish their Tee-To-Green Personality score with their basic course information. “It would allow golfers to instantly understand a lot of valuable information about the layout and playability of a course,” he said.
Derusseau encourages golfers to like his Facebook page, the golf course fitting system, so they can receive the weekly “Play Like The Pros Challenge.”