Living,breathing and insuring golf

All in the family: Hoosiers pride themselves on safety and loss prevention practices of a family owned golf course

Indiana insurance agent Ron Smith has been playing golf since he could “breathe.” His father loved the game. His brothers love the game. His entire family loves the game. So it’s no surprise that Smith, owner of the independent agency Smith Sawyer Smith Inc., in Rochester, Ind., insures a few golf courses … including the Rock Hollow Golf Course in Peru, Ind., owned by his brother, Terry Smith, and nephew, Todd Smith.

Terry Smith, president of Rock Industries Inc., a limestone, sand and gravel company, wanted to turn his family’s passion for golf into an 18-hole championship course the Smith family could call home. An abandoned mine quarry owned by Rock Industries seemed like an ideal spot for Terry’s dream.

“It was a sand and gravel operation and we had really taken all the gravel out, Terry said. “It had been inactive for about 20 years.”

That set the stage for the beginnings of what would become Rock Hollow Golf Club, a public golf course and club laid out over 300 acres of a mined-out stone quarry. Today, Rock Hollow has become one of the premier public tracks not only in Indiana but also throughout the Midwest. In 2005, Rock Hollow made Golf Digest’s “201 Places to Play,” one of only three Indiana golf courses to be named to the list. In 2004, Golf Magazine named Rock Hollow the “Eighth Best Course in the United States and Canada for under $50.”

Rock Hollow not only prides itself on being a great course to play, but also on its remarkable safety record. In its 12-years in business, the course hasn’t had a single insurance claim — a track record that began with its design, according to the Smith family. Everything including the course layout, golf cart paths and the roughing of the club’s concrete floors was a strategic risk management move.

Ron Smith also attributes Rock Hollow’s pristine safety record to Terry’s background in the high-risk construction business. “My brother has a pretty extensive safety background in the construction industry, and he’s carried that over with employees and all the people that work at Rock Hollow,” Ron noted.

Of course, having an insurance agent in the family also may help Rock Hollow stay safe on the links.

Safety begins with design
Golf, like any sport, doesn’t come without some degree of risk. Errant balls, golf car accidents, slips, trips and falls, and even lighting strikes all pose risks to a golf course and its golfers.

When Terry and Todd Smith set out to construct Rock Hollow, they recruited Indianapolis native Tim Liddy, protégé of world-renowned golf course architect Pete Dye, to design the course.

Mitigating the risk of exposures like slips, trips and falls on a golf course depends heavily on the initial design or layout of the golf course, Ron noted.

The design of golf car paths is also an important consideration for safety, Terry said.

The terrain of the old mine quarry was filled with dense brush, “so Tim (Liddy), Mr. (Pete) Dye, Todd and myself all spent a lot of time crawling through the brush” to scout out the course layout, Terry said.

“We designed our cart paths in a way that we feel like they don’t offer a lot of risk getting in and out,” he said. “We let the carts enter the fairways at designated spots on all of our holes, and we contoured the cart paths and the ground leading up to them so that you don’t run the risk of upsetting the cart.”

That attention to detail in the design phase has made the course user-friendly and safe for players at all levels, as well as seniors and the disabled.

“We don’t have any place that a handicapped person can’t get to,” Terry said.

“The subtlety of a golf course is in its shaping, and Rock Hollow used a shaper that, in my view, did a tremendous job putting subtleties both in the fairways and around the greens,” Ron added. But at the same time, the course shaper left plenty of room for people to approach a bunker without having to go up or down a steep hill — an important safety consideration for players on the course.

Parallel holes
The design of a golf course can affect potential injuries from errant balls as well, Ron noted.

“Rock Hollow, specifically, as opposed to the other golf courses we insure, has a design that’s a little bit unique in that it doesn’t really have parallel golf holes,” Ron noted. “So you don’t have an opportunity, really, to hit into another group on this golf course … that negates any possibility of accidents from fairway to fairway.”

Parallel golf holes are not uncommon, Ron added. “I know of one particular golf course where the fairways run pretty much parallel back and forth, one right next to the other,” he said. “My gosh, you walk off of a green on British Open courses and there’s a tee box … those are all parallel and they’ve been playing golf on those courses for 300 years,” he said.

In Rock Hollow’s design, the Smiths chose to avoid parallel holes to lessen the risk of injury, which can be severe. In a study conducted by Travelers last year, “Safety on the Fairway: Injuries and Losses at Golf Facilities,” struck-by-object claims were the second most costly general liability claim incurred by more than 1,400 golf courses between 1987 and 2004 for the more than 9,000 general liability claims studied.

“I know of one particular golf course that had an incident where a gentleman struck a drive and unfortunately it hit a young lady in the eye, and she lost her eye from that incident,” Ron said.

Signage is another risk management tool.

“They do a great job of signage at Rock Hollow, directing players on and off fairways and on and off greens in some specific areas that are gently sloped so that, again, we’re mitigating slips and falls,” Ron noted.

Yet any golf course can improve safety through signage, Ron added, regardless of the overall course design.

“I don’t care how old it is; maybe the design wasn’t made so it really was user-friendly,” he said. “Any golf course can be changed if the people will take a little time and look at the safe spots to enter a fairway and to enter a green. I think that makes a difference.”

Ron reiterated that every aspect, from the flooring in the club house to the design of the golf course, made Rock Hollow a much safer risk than it would have been with a design that didn’t give much thought to golfers’ traffic patterns.

Even so, the most effective way to avoid injuries on the golf course is golfer responsibility, Ron said. “If we could get people that are playing golf and that love golf just to pay more attention, I think that would mitigate a lot of the potential for claims,” he noted. “We all get absorbed into the game. And we all get absorbed into talking to our friends. But we need to make sure that we’re watching what’s going on around us.”

Specialized golf market
In the 12 short years since Rock Hollow’s grand opening, the insurance market for golf facilities has broadened and become more specialized in coverage forms.

“There was some specialization in the golf industry, but not a lot,” according to Ron. “I think what’s happened, (is)the specialty golf markets have really driven this marketplace.”

The specialty insurers were the people who opened the door to coverages only seen on a golf course, such as vandalism damage to greens and tees, he added. “That’s something that wasn’t thought of five or 10 years ago.”

Today, Ron sees several standard carriers competing in writing the same kind of unique exposures golf courses face. “In our office, which is a relatively small office, we have three carriers with specialty programs directed specifically at golf courses, even to the tune that it will insure the vandalism that could occur on greens and tees,” he said.

While there are more markets for golf facilities, the forms for those coverages may be quite different. “You really do have to look at forms because there are variances in the forms as to what is and what is not covered,” Ron advised. “But generally speaking, if it’s an asset of a golf course, you can buy some insurance to protect against the loss of that asset, even if it’s the trees, the shrubs, the greens, the tees, etc.”

Insuring golf
Golf has been a passion throughout Ron’s life just as much as insurance. He’s been involved with both nearly all his life. “I would tell you I enjoy playing golf as much as I do insuring a golf course,” he said. “I enjoy insuring Rock Hollow specifically because it is my brother’s, and he takes great pride in it. I take great pride in being able to take care of his insurance needs for his golf course.”

But he admits, as far as insurance hazards go, insuring a golf course is the same as insuring any commercial account.

“You have to know what you’re dealing with,” he said. “Our job as insurance agents is to try and understand exactly what the client is dealing with on a day-to-day basis. Then we make recommendations from there with the help of (insurance) companies that have risk-management type resources that we can use.”

For Ron, it just so happens that when it comes to golf, he knows a lot about it already. “So it’s easy for me to understand the nuances that are needed to make sure we insure a golf course properly.”

When it comes to insuring golf, there can never be enough emphasis on safety.

“It’s the same as any other industry,” he said. “If you follow the basic parameters of safety and you pay attention, and the boss gets involved in safety so that employees know that it’s not lip service, then I think this market will continue to be an excellent market.”