With the exciting news about an Iowa high school student making a 6 million to 1 shot yesterday, today would be a full 180 for the game of golf, as one Eastern Iowa golf course plans on closing its doors for good in the upcoming days.

La Porte City Golf Club announced they will be closing down on September 10th. The announcement was made via their Facebook page.

The sad reality of the current state of golf and golf courses across the country is this is a fairly common occurrence. According to Reason, 221 local governments submitted financial statements for the year 2020.

Out of those 221 local governments, 155 reported losing money on their local golf courses, to a combined $61 million dollars in taxpayer money. Only 62 governments reported breaking even or turning a profit during the 2020 fiscal year.

As someone who loves to play golf for many different reasons, it's a pretty tough pill to swallow. I can imagine many different factors go into the decline golf has seen over the past years. If I had to guess, I believe the cost to play and interest in the game are two of the biggest factors golf courses have moving forward to try and turn a profit. The truth is... it's expensive to golf. Golf clubs, shoes, golf balls, fees to play, all of those cost money, and depending on your financial situation, it's a lot of money for some people.

There is hope for golfers who enjoy playing in La Porte City as the owners have been open to ideas on keeping the course open. The owners said in their Facebook post

I hope you can work together and pull something off for the sake of the course and save this for the community. Thank you for the great years. I can understand the emotions you are all feeling, I am feeling them also.

While the future may look grim for the La Porte City Course they do ask that everyone please be respectful to the bartenders and management as they need the staff to stick around until they close on the 10th of September, which they posted on their Facebook page.

I don't know what the answer is to maintaining and growing the game of golf. Selfishly, I hope it's something that turns around soon. If there was a way to make it cheaper to play and somehow allow courses to still make money, that might help but I'm not smart enough to figure out how to do that. If you have any ideas on how the La Porte City golf course can remain open, La Porte City Golf Club is willing to hear them.

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