Instead of being full of golfers, Holiday Park Golf Course in Saskatoon sits empty as spring snow affects opening week.
“The staff would’ve been out getting the course ready to open and we would’ve been selling range balls for people to be out on the range,” said City of Saskatoon recreation services manager Roxane Melnyk.
The now snow-covered course was open Monday, but is back to being temporarily closed. This year’s opening week looks a lot different than 2021 when a full crowd golfed under sunny skies.
“Unfortunately, the weather dictates what we do, so we can have the best inventions of opening on a certain day but the weather will push us back,” Melnyk said.
Would-be golfers had a mixed reaction to the snowy conditions
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“It could be worse,” golfer Parker Atkins said. “It’s not freezing out.”
Another Saskatonian thinks otherwise.
“I hate it, it’s terrible, I want to play baseball,” golfer Adam Lehmann said. “This is horrible but we should know where we live by now.”
Global News meteorologist Peter Quinlan said it’s not unusual to have precipitation in the spring, but substantial snowfalls at the end of April are rare.
“We’re going to see the snow melt in the Saskatoon area probably by the end of the week, into the weekend, there’s not a ton of snow out there,” Quinlan said. “But parts of southeastern Saskatchewan could see 30-50 centimeters of snow into southern Manitoba so they won’t be golfing probably until mid-May.”
At Holiday Park Golf Course, staff anxiously wait to welcome golfers back for the rest of spring and summer.
“We do the evaluations at the beginning of the week and end of the week,” Melnyk said. “We do an evaluation to determine where we are. Right now we are targeting for sometime next week. Again, depending on how long the snow lasts.”
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