1/ The Course
Avery Ranch Golf Club is an 18-hole course in North Austin designed by Andy Raugust.
It's in a pretty affluent, suburban area, the kind with custom signs at the entrance to each neighborhood and strip malls where all the businesses look the same. The clubhouse and amenities reflect those surroundings: everything is clean, new, and nice, and the grounds are typically in good condition.
Avery is a perfectly fine golf course. It will always have a special place in my heart as the course where I first broke par. But overall, it's a little forgettable.
Most of the holes have woods or OB to at least one side, if not both. For someone like me who tends to spray it off the tee, this certainly makes the course tougher, but also not necessarily very interesting. It can end up feeling like the same question is being asked on every hole: can you hit a precise tee shot?
I don't want to be too harsh. The back nine is fun, especially the stretch from 12-17. The 13th hole is a fun little downhill par-3 with a semi-blind tee shot. Then you have back-to-back reachable par 5s, followed by a driveable par 4. Who wouldn't have fun with that?
The most memorable hole on the course is the challenging par-5 5th, which isn't so much well-designed as very, very difficult. The fairway runs about 400 yards dead-straight from the back tees, before turning 90° left and going hard downhill. Then, you'll have to carry a pond to reach a tricky green with a few different plateaus.
Forget going for it in two. Depending on where you hit your tee shot, hitting a good layup might not even be possible. If you're up the left side, the woods will block you out, but if you miss right, you might be in the sand or punching out from the trees (trust me on this one).
So overall, Avery is a solid layout, and usually in pretty decent shape.
2/ The Subscription
Avery was the closest public course to where I lived in Austin – about a 10-15 minute drive. (There are two courses that were closer, but they're both private.) So Avery ended up being the most convenient place for me to play.
But that convenience came at a cost. Tee times at Avery can cost up to $150 during peak weekend hours, and buckets at their TopTracer-enabled range will run you anywhere from $10 for a small (!) to $20 for a large (!!). That may not seem like much for some, but I mostly play at munis and rarely pay more than $70 for a round of golf. So I couldn't quite fathom spending the money to play there regularly.
At first, I drove a bit further to other courses. But, eventually, I learned about the Avery Ranch Players' Club program. For $160/month, you could get two free rounds of golf and unlimited use of the range. Eventually I caved and joined up.
In theory, this saved me quite a bit of money. I usually play about twice a month, and go to the range maybe 4-5 times. So on the face of it, in a typical month, I could get over $300 in value for just $160.
But those savings come with some real costs. Of course, there are the typical downsides of any subscription – the risk that you'll forget to cancel, or won't be able to use your benefits. (There were a few months where I hardly went at all, and basically gave them a few hundred bucks for nothing.) I'm more interested, though, in how it affected my overall golf experience.
3/ The Sweetgreen of Golf
Normally, I'd spread my golf out across several courses in the area. But because I "locked in" with the subscription in order to get reasonable prices at Avery, I ended up playing there most of the time.
Many other people also purchased the subscriptions. As a result, the range was nearly always jam-packed. Sure, you get unlimited balls, but you might have to wait 20 minutes to use them.
This subscription-pricing scheme also means that people who come in "off the street" have to pay through the nose. I think $150 for a weekend round at Avery is crazy. It's a nice course, but it's not that nice. To me, the 'true value' is somewhere around $75 – so it makes sense with the subscription, but not without it.
Maybe that's not such a problem for one course. But imagine if every course switched to a program like this. Avid golfers might happily sign up for a subscription, but then they end up mostly playing the same course. And where would that leave beginners? Or those who aren't able to play enough to make the subscription worthwhile?
I've seen similar processes referred to elsewhere as "Sweetgreenification". Companies like Sweetgreen carve out specific customer niches (like affluent white-collar workers looking for a fast, healthy lunch) and create a product specifically to meet their needs. The result is that these people are getting their needs met, but then they get sucked in to going there every day. They've optimized their routine at the cost of being separated from the rest of society.
This line from the linked post sums it up best for me: "It's like our entire daily routine slowly becomes an airplane boarding process." That's kind of how it felt returning to play Avery month after month.
4/ Conclusion
I have no doubt the subscription model is a more profitable way to run the course. Most people who play regularly seem willing enough to pay a monthly fee to get reasonable pricing – I'd say most of the people I got paired up with had one of the subscriptions. And besides the members, apparently there are plenty of people in Austin who will happily pay over $100 for a tee time at Avery, as crazy as that seems to me.
Since I've moved to Nashville, I've really enjoyed playing all around town and not feeling locked in to a single course. Maybe that "lock-in" would feel more worth it at a private club that isn't so crowded. But at Avery, it ended up cheapening the whole experience somehow, even as I was getting a good deal for my money.
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