I tried to book a round. I got a phone number and a browser warning.

I grew up playing with my Pap and my Uncle Bub. Nine holes, walking, usually early, usually quiet. I loved every minute of it, and then I turned 14 and decided I had better things to do. I did not. I just thought I did.

I came back at 30 as a dad. Different game. Or the same game and a different me. What I love now is the complexity of it. Change one thing in your swing and seven other things change, and you do not find out which seven until the ball is already in the air. I love playing with the boys. I love playing alone more than I should admit. I love God's country on a crisp morning when the frost is still on the shady side of the fairway. I love playing in the rain, which nobody understands and I cannot explain.

What I do not love

Big companies making simple things complicated. And big companies taking advantage of local businesses because the local business has no other option. Those two things are most of what is wrong with the world, and they are all of what is wrong with booking a tee time.

Here is what happened. I wanted to play Olde Homeplace, the course right down the road from me. I pulled up their website on my phone in the parking lot at work. The browser warned me the site was not safe. I clicked through anyway, because I am stubborn, and found a phone number. That was the booking system. A phone number. For a course I could see from the highway.

Then I looked at what the alternatives were for a course like that, and it was worse. The big tee-time company takes a tee time off your sheet every day and sells it for themselves. That is the price. Not a dollar amount. A tee time, every day, forever. By the golf course owners' own trade group's math, that is over a thousand dollars a month for a small course. And the golfer pays a fee on top, and the golfer becomes the big company's customer instead of the course's. The other options cost hundreds a month and come with a contract and modules and a sales rep.

So I built it

I build websites for a living. My company is DiamondBack Advertising, here in Kernersville. We build sites for plumbers and dentists and churches and a trash can cleaning guy, and every one of them gets the same thing: a fast site that does the one job it needs to do, for a flat price, from a person they can text. I could not understand why a golf course could not have that too. So I stopped trying to understand it and built it.

Walking Nine is the booking I wanted in the parking lot that day. Three taps. No account. The price is the price. Walking nine, by myself, on the first screen. And for the course, it is one flat number, no traded tee times, no contract, and a real person down the road. If that sounds like what you want for your course, let's talk.

Nick
DiamondBack Advertising, Kernersville, NC