He has come forth with some winning innovations

Forth has Copetown Woods pushing the golf course envelope

It’s the time of the year that all golfers hate. Aeration season. The time when course superintendents punch a zillion holes all over the golf course.

The long and the short of it is the holes, which are filled with sand, make the grass better in the long term but are generally awful to play on in the short term.

And, what makes it really painful is when the golf course charges you full price, or worse, doesn’t even tell you the facility has been aerated.

Copetown Woods Golf Club has done something about it this year.

“Hey, we’re golfers, too, and we get it,” said Copetown Woods general manager Barry Forth, who oversaw the aeration of his course earlier this week.

“We kept nine holes closed one day to allow our crew to work uninterrupted and then the following day we closed the other nine.”

That’s not what made it really unique from a consumer perspective. CW sold nine-hole green fees at a reduced rate, made everyone play from the very forward tees and put the pins in the most difficult places they could find on the greens, just to make it interesting.

That’s just the latest in a string of unique ideas Forth has come up with.

Forth, 43, literally grew up on the property back when it was his family’s broccoli farm. He was also there in 2001 when his father, Gord, brought in architect Dick Kirkpatrick to convert one of the farms into a golf course.

The younger Forth, who was the guiding force behind Dundas’s successful bid in 2010 to win the Kraft Hockeyville title, worked at the golf course from when it opened in 2003 until 2012 when he felt the urge to try something different.

Forth was hired by the Wasserman agency and held multiple portfolios during his time there, including Shaw Communications, their relationship with the RBC Canadian Open, the Grey Cup and the Shaw Charity Classic.

He also managed Manulife’s partnership with the LPGA for a year and then, in his last four years with Wasserman, he directed RBC’s golf sponsorship portfolio.

With that experience under his belt, he returned to CW in 2019 and barely had a year to get reacquainted before COVID-19 turned all aspects of the golf business and life in general on its collective ear.

It meant to survive in the golf business you had to think outside the box and Forth has proven time and time again that’s something he’s good at.

In April 2020, Copetown had booked 150 people for Easter Brunch and when Forth found out they weren’t going to be able to host them, he innovated. The answer: takeout. “Between Good Friday fish and chips and Easter meals, we placed more than 1,100 orders,” he said.

Forth said, once the word got out, the floodgates opened.

“We made the decision to go with fish and chips every Friday thereafter and other meals on the weekend and we were doing between 300 to 400 meals every weekend.”

After golf courses were suddenly ordered to close again this past spring, Forth said he realized it was picnic weather and they had many hectares of beautiful green space that, temporarily at least, wasn’t being used as a golf course.

Before you knew it, Copetown Woods was selling picnic lunches and you could wander anywhere on the golf course, except the greens, spread out a blanket, and have a picnic.

In the leadup to this summer’s Olympic golf competition in Japan, Forth reached out to the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame and was able to borrow the magnificent trophy Canadian George S. Lyon received for winning the 1904 Olympic Golf competition.

For a week, it was at Copetown Woods where thrilled golfers were able to get their picture taken with the priceless trophy.

“That was a cool experience,” says Forth, who gets obvious enjoyment when one of his plans for the golf course turns out even better than expected.