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New Lake Vermilion golf course comes equipped with GPS
Date: 7/1/2004
by Wayne Nelson
Pictured: The 18th hole at The Wilderness at Fortune Bay includes a long fairway and water on the approach to the green. (Photo: Courtesy of The Wilderness at Fortune Bay)
Minnesota’s newest 18-hole championship golf destination opened in May on the shores of Lake Vermilion with a new twist: carts equipped with a GPS system designed to maintain the pace of play.
Joe Wisocki IV, general manager and golf pro at The Wilderness at Fortune Bay, said the 9-inch screen monitors in its 75-cart fleet carts help golfers play the new course. The satellite-driven system provides a map and description of each hole, and exact location of every cart.
The global positioning system, which will cost about $40,000 a year to operate, also will help to balance play throughout the course, Wisocki said.
The $10.5 million course near Tower, 90 miles north of Duluth, was designed by architect Jeffrey Brauer. He also designed two 18-hole courses at Giants Ridge — The Legend and The Quarry — just 30 miles away near Biwabik. The Quarry opened last season.
The new Wilderness is owned by the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa and is part of the Fortune Bay Resort Casino, a complete vacation destination with 116 rooms, a 50-slip marina, pool, RV park, fitness center and a newly remodeled casino.
The golf course is operated by KemperSports Management of Northbrook, IL.
The firm manages more than 70 golf facilities nationwide, including such nationally ranked courses as The Glen Club, Glenview, IL; Bandon Dunes and Pacific Dunes, both in Bandon, OR; Harding Park, San Francisco; Bolingbrook (IL) Golf Club; and Desert Willow, Palm Desert, CA. It also manages Chicago Park District public courses and several major sporting events, among them the Booz Allen Classic and the EA SPORTS Maui Invitational.
The tribe selected KemperSports Management in a request-for-qualifications process. Duluth native Wisocki, 37, who has opened three other courses for KemperSports, returned to Northeastern Minnesota in January for his fourth.
He acknowledged the golf industry slump over the past three years resulting from a soft economy and a building boom that's produced overcapacity. “Golf is a tough industry. We’ve built too many golf courses overall, but I think northern Minnesota actually is an undeveloped market,” he said.
Wisocki thinks three Brauer-designed courses within a 30-mile stretch will produce synergy for all, and the three courses are jointly promoting their offerings. All three also are member-participants in the Wild North Golf Alliance, a marketing group that includes smaller nine-hole courses in Ely, Aurora-Hoyt Lakes and Wolf's Ridge.
The newest of the three stands to get an immediate boost from a favorable review in the May issue of Golf Digest and its online affiliate golfdigest.com from Ron Whitten, the magazine’s course architecture critic.
“It was a very good review,” said Andy Datco, project manager for the golf course and executive director of Bois Forte Enterprises, its owner. “Joe is quite pleased with the trend. We have a lot of bookings.”
With a golfing market expected to improve with the economic recovery, Datco views the three Brauer-designed courses as favorably positioned to attract business. “Our job is to steal business from (courses in) Brainerd and the Twin Cities,” he said.
Using gaming receipts, the tribe has built assisted living housing and a heritage center in a community development strategy to combat long-standing poverty on the reservation.
Datco said the heritage center presents the story of the band’s history and evolution to the present in a meaningful way to both tribal and non-tribal members.
First with the hotel and now the golf course project, the tribe is moving its economic strategy beyond gaming, Datco said. “It reflects the reality that the reservation is lifting itself out of poverty by parlaying gaming into more diversified development,” he said.
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