First Tee Idahome – The purchase of Pierce Park Greens, and the realization of a decades-long dream

by Shane René, IGA Administrator of Media and Communications

Just a few years before First Tee Idaho’s inaugural year of programming in 2005, Nick Blasius spent an afternoon at Pierce Park Greens feeding the larva stage of his golf bug with a bucket of range balls. His father, Bruce, snapped a photo.

“I can’t be older than like nine-years old in the photo,” he said, sitting on the patio in front of Pierce Park’s boutique, but unsophisticated, clubhouse. “And it looks like I’m standing on that left side of the range and those trees there are a lot smaller.”

The row of seven, mostly-coniferous trees that shield the first hole from the driving range have spent the last 20 years reaching for the sky – and Blasius has, too. In high school, he took his first golf job just down the block at Plantation Country Club (now The River Club); and by the time he was 25, he’d gone from cart kid to head professional. Last month, the 32-year-old executive director of First Tee Idaho arranged a deal for his chapter to buy Pierce Park Greens, putting those familiar trees into the hands of an organization that has grown up alongside them.

For nearly two decades, First Tee Idaho has borrowed pockets of space and time from the 27 acres that surround their trunks, sending kids from all walks of life to venture through their shade and out onto the nine-hole track that wraps around the range, always guided by the non-profit’s faith in the virtues of the game. Some of those kids have grown deep roots in golf, finding life-long passion in a game that’s bound to open doors for them as they grow older, taller and wiser. Others have taken their roots elsewhere, armed with a strength of character to plant themselves as upstanding members of their chosen communities. But no matter where they’ve settled, a generation of First Tee disciples found fertile soil at Pierce Park Greens.

“When I started talking with the family that owns the land, I kept making sure they understood how important I knew this place was,” Blasius said. “And I would always call it a ‘community asset’ — it’s not just a golf course.”

For Blasius and his seed-sewing deputies – Program Director Katie McKelvey and Coordinator Britnee Nieto – having a garden of their own is the key to a new era of growth. And it’s a dream that’s lived at the center of their efforts since COVID-19, when a flood of registrations first left waitlists overflowing.

“We grew from 450 registrations in 2019 to over 1,000 in 2021.” McKelvey said. “Now we are pretty much maxed out at right around 1,200.”

But the dream of a green-grass facility for First Tee Idaho is not just the product of pandemic pressures. It’s a dream with roots in the chapter’s founding. But at that time, Dennis Labrum – one of Pierce Park’s original owners and former First Tee Idaho board member – helped eliminate the immediate need for property.

“[Labrum] graciously agreed to let Pierce Park kind of be our central location for programming,” said Anne Williamson, who took the reins as the chapter’s first executive director in 2005. “And, even back then, it was a great place to start. But from the get-go, our dream was to eventually have a course to call home.”

Williamson says funding also stood in the way, which is why having a course to call home is a common dream for First Tee chapters across the country. According to Jennifer Weiler, First Tee’s national Senior Vice President, just 51 of First Tee’s 150 chapters currently own or operate their own facilities. She says those arrangements vary widely.

Some chapters, like First Tee of Metropolitan New York, operate courses owned by a local YMCA or parks department. Some have been gifted land at public facilities to construct a learning center; or, in the case of First Tee Cleveland, gut and renovate an abandoned school building next to a public golf course. Others managed to raise enough money to build from scratch.

“Once you’ve seen one First Tee chapter,” Weiler said, “you’ve seen one First Tee chapter.”

But until last month, First Tee Idaho was part of the majority: a nomadic, if not homeless, chapter stuck between the benevolence of local golf course operators and the public’s booming appetite for golf. As American golfers continue to book more rounds, and national First Tee registrations trend above pre-covid levels, Weiler says 47% of First Tee chapters have reported some loss of access at host courses.

First Tee Idaho has continued to enjoy the generosity of many Treasure Valley golf courses over the years, but there is only so much space they can ask for. So, in 2021, when Blasius dusted off his organization’s old dream, he went out looking to build. He had a single anonymous donor ready to finance the project and a three-to-five-year plan to make it all happen. Eventually, he found some headway with the city of Boise.

“It sounded like a bit of a pipe dream,” said Burke Spensky, a First Tee board member and one of Idaho’s premier mid-amateurs. He notes that Boise’s growth has made desirable land incredibly difficult to acquire, and the costs may mute the vision of what First Tee Idaho wanted to build. He imagined a First Tee-branded Top Golf – artificial turf and colorful targets; something functional but far from ideal.

“Kids need to learn how to play golf on grass,” he said. “They need to be around grass; they need to feel grass underneath their feet; we all do.”

After a deal with the city of Boise fell through this spring, a frustrated Blasius pivoted back to where First Tee Idaho began, approaching David Parker – Pierce Park’s owner since 2009 – about his exit plans. And just a few months after years of progress dissolved in a city of Boise boardroom, Blasius was a signature away from giving First Tee Idaho a permanent home.

“Everything in life happens for a reason, right?” he said. “We looked into all these different avenues and it led us to here. And this couldn’t be a better fit for us.

Today, the team at First Tee Idaho is wading into a dream come true – and a whole new world of golf course ownership. By attaching themselves to a for-profit engine like Pierce Park, they will, in effect, double their operating budget. And that will put the facility in a unique position. Few First Tee Chapters have this sort of capacity to generate revenue, and few golf courses function as private non-profits. Blasius expects them to feed each other.

“It will be fun,” Blasius said. “I was talking to Hailey, my wife, about it last night – it’s just so exciting to have a blank slate in the sense of: what can we do, ya know?”

In another sense, Pierce Park Greens is anything but a “blank slate.” First Tee Idaho will certainly enjoy a newfound autonomy over the time and space they have for programming, but that freedom comes with a slate of new responsibilities. McKelvey and Nieto, who are settling into new office space, have become acutely aware of that.

McKelvey says a wall is likely on the way for their corner of the clubhouse, but, for now, the exposure to the front desk has been convenient for getting up to speed on the day-to-day operations of running a golf course. They’ve been taking turns manning the desk, getting familiar with Pierce Park’s point of sale system, season-pass holders, and inventory. McKelvey and Nieto are far from strangers at Pierce Park, but the realities of ownership will take their time to settle in.

“Is it okay if they come play the course with us?” McKelvey turned and asked a longtime Pierce Park employee, looking to take a couple IGA employs on a tour of the course.

“You’ll have to ask someone from First Tee Idaho about that,” he quipped.

For Nieto, working at Pierce Park represents her own full circle moment. She’s a product of the Covid golf boom, growing obsessed with the game in the summer of 2020. That winter, she received a holiday punch card to Pierce Park, which pushed her further down the path to her gig with First Tee. This past month, she was put in charge of designing them.

“I still say this, but it is my current dream job,” Nieto said. “It checks all the boxes for me.”

One of those boxes is certainly golf, but the biggest one is working with kids. And that’s the box that makes the acquisition of Pierce Park so exciting for her. Having grown accustomed to turning kids away each summer, they now have the capacity to reach more kids than ever before. She says that because their waitlists are capped at 10, the 60-70 kids who missed out this summer may just be the tip of the iceberg.

McKelvey, who Blasius described as the “nucleus” of First Tee Idaho, also has her eyes set on how much closer their community is set to become. Since she started with First Tee as an intern in 2017, she’s been able to visit other chapters and has witnessed just how vital a central, consistent location can be.

“I just kept thinking about how incredible that would be just because of the cohesiveness,” she said. “When kids see the same people day in day out, that’s ultimately when our program functions the best – when they are able to be with people over and over again and actually build a relationship.”

Blasius, who is armed with experience in managing a golf course, is particularly taken by the fact they are now in charge of something that already functions as a community asset. Back in front of the clubhouse, where he reflected on the photo of himself on the left side of the range, his focus shifted down the rope line.

“There are guys out there right now,” he said. “They show up at the same time together and they just go hit balls together. And who knows what they talk about, but it’s like their spot. Some guys go out to lunch, they have their routines, go for walks on the greenbelt. But this is their spot, you know? Just in the couple weeks we’ve owned the place I’ve probably seen them eight or nine times.”

Weiler says that one key advantage of owning a property with an active, adult customer base is marketing. First Tee Idaho recently updated the pins on the practice putting green with their logo, and more branding is on the way. Weiler thinks that will foment broader community awareness of the chapter’s mission.

Looking forward, Blasius sees Pierce Park as a community center as much as anything. He was raised by the game, found his own community in it, and wants to build what he described as “a club for every kid.” He says future plans for the property will aim to underpin that ethic. And it won’t be too long before his 18-month-old daughter, Isla, will become a First Tee kid too, raised in part by the row of trees he can see from his office window.

“I hope one day that she’s proud that her dad worked really hard to try to do something cool for junior golfers in Idaho,” he said. “And she can come to work with me… She can go work on her short game while I’m getting some stuff done in the office.”

(This article first appeared on the Idaho Golf Association website, and is posted here by permission.)