It’s amazing how much can change in a day.
Roughly 24 hours after opening for the season, Cooke Municipal Golf Course was forced to close until further notice after snow and sleet blanketed Prince Albert on Friday. The move means The Northern Team Championship has been cancelled. It will not be rescheduled.
“It’s not a simple decision,” Cooke Executive Professional Darcy Myers said. “We were hoping to maybe reschedule or postpone, but there are a lot of other tournaments and everybody’s schedules are busy.”
The two-day tournament was scheduled to start on Saturday. Myers said they had 144 golfers registered to compete.
“It’s just really unfortunate that it’s come to this,” he said. “We have other tournaments that people can definitely play in and still get their rounds of golf in in other ways, but we’ll just have to take a knee this year for The Team Championship.”
Even if the May long weekend was snow-free, Prince Albert golfers would have faced an incredibly late start to the season.
Last year, local golf courses opened in April. Now, golfers might not get out until the last week of May.
“This has been quite an unusual spring, obviously,” Myers said. “A couple days ago it was 27 C and today we’ve got snow on the ground, so it’s been very unusual, but there’s not much we can do about it.”
From a financial standpoint, Myers said such a late start to the season will have a negative impact, but said the City-owned course isn’t the only one impacted by the weather.
“You don’t get these days back once they’re gone,” he said. “It’s a financial burden, but we’re not the only ones in the same boat. There’s lots of other industries feeling this late start.
“We’re a weather dependent industry. You take the good with the bad.”
The next tournament on the Cooke Municipal Golf Course calendar is the Ladies Northern scheduled for June 6-7.
