Sunday forecast for The Sanctuary Golf Club: Cloudy with a 100% chance of closing
PLAIN TWP. – Jill Henry has adjusted to things closing, and she is having to do it again.
In the 1970s, it was her high school alma mater, Canton Lincoln. Some years later, it was her dad's restaurant on 30th Street.
Now, it's her golf course, The Sanctuary Golf Club, where she has seen thousands of faces come through across the last 14 years since she took a job there.
Closing day for the Plain Township course abutting the North Canton city limits is Sunday. She was working the counter on the final Monday.
It was 50 degrees and cloudy. At 11:30 a.m., a man dressed for wind chill pulled clubs out of a trunk. There were 40 vehicles in the parking lot.
It was warm in the lone little building near the first tee, where Henry was working the counter.
"It's sad the course is closing," one person says.
She smiles. She has one of those personalities that can make people comfortable at calling hours.
She'll find another job, she promises, noting she wants it to be at a golf course.
What if someone wanted to be in the last group on the last day? Henry explains tee times toward the end of business Sunday remained available, but anyone riding needs to have the cart back in at 6:30. The sun sets at 6:45.
Sunday is no great day to attract a normal golf crowd, going by the forecast (high of 52 with a 50% chance of rain) and the football game (San Francisco 49ers-Cleveland Browns, 1 p.m. kickoff).
What is left of the employee staff hopes to sneak in the course's unofficial final round on Monday. Henry aims to be out there, across Applegrove Street from the houses covering what used to be Bob-O-Link golf course.
Her dad took her to Bob-O-Link to play when she was a Lincoln student in the 1960s.
Golf course history: Bob-O-Link becomes The Sanctuary
In 2003, developers Bill Lemmon and Bob DeHoff bought Bob-O-Link's original 18 holes and a newer Bob-O-Link nine across Applegrove. They soon closed the original 18 with plans to put housing on top of it. They had the newer nine built into an 18-hole course.
The wetlands aspect, around which an additional nine was designed, inspired Lemmon to suggest a fresh name: The Sanctuary.
The new 18-hole course that opened in 2004 won't see a 20th birthday.
The owners agreed that continuing as a golf course wasn't good business. This continues to puzzle some course owners, including a longtime operator, Herb Page.
Page is an owner of Windmill Lakes, 25 miles northeast of The Sanctuary. In a recent conversation about course closures, he said:
"The Sanctuary is really surprising, because if you talk to any owner, the golf business has just been phenomenal the last few years."
Page agreed operating a golf course is expensive, but, nodding to Stark County, he added, "Are you kidding me? If you've got a public golf course down there now, you've got to be killing it."
Great recession crushes golf, COVID-19 rejuvenates the sport
Andy Lyons, from the ownership family at Lyons Den near Canal Fulton, didn't go that far, but he said, "We've been very blessed. We're doing well."
Lyons had a front-row seat to an ironic spike in play the year COVID-19 hit. One early April day in 2020, as shutdowns swept indoor businesses, the Lyons Den parking lot was overrun as lines of foursomes waited to tee off.
Public golf courses got quiet after the national economy duck-hooked into the woods in 2008.
"Things were so bleak for so long," Lyons said. "People weren't playing. There are two ways to make money in golf, number of rounds played and dollars per round, simple math.
"The sad part was that course owners together agreed with third-party brokers to discount their rounds dramatically in hopes of increasing rounds to offset losses."
The misguided hope had many owners in dire straits, he said.
Then COVID-19 hit, bringing a cabin fever epidemic and curing the golf slump.
Tam O'Shanter, Skyland Pines, Seven Hills and now The Sanctuary
The most puzzling local closure perhaps was Seven Hills Country Club late in the 2022 season. Closings of Tam O'Shanter and Skyland Pines were easier to understand because those courses gave way to rich developments, the direction Sanctuary seems headed.
What Seven Hills might become is a million-dollar mystery.
Tammy, Skyland and Seven Hills had their fans. The Sanctuary had more acclaim.
In a ranking by GolfClevelandOhio.com of Northeast Ohio's top 20 public courses, updated in 2023, Stark County got two mentions, The Quarry at No. 2 and The Sanctuary at No. 12.
Dan Barlow of Jackson Township enjoys course hopping and chose to play The Sanctuary one last time last week.
"The course was in decent shape," said Barlow, 69. "There were no markers on the tees, which was a strange experience. The ball washers were gone.
"It was one of the better public courses in the county, with difficult par 5s and a couple difficult par 4s, due to the creek. The fresh-grilled hot dogs, hamburgers and brats available at the turn or after the round were a nice touch."
Sandwiches are about the only thing from the course that won't be auctioned.
An online bidding sale will be conducted by Kiko, supervised by the auctioneer's Eric Bevington from Nov. 21 to Nov. 28. Kiko will take inventory soon and then post an itemized sale list.
A stone marker at the entry on Applegrove Street bears these words:
THE
SANCTUARY
GOLF CLUB
It is unclear what will become of the marker.
Given its configuration and under the circumstances, it looks hauntingly like a tombstone.
Reach Steve at steve.doerschuk@cantonrep.com
On Twitter: @sdoerschukREP
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Golfers puzzled over closing of North Canton's The Sanctuary Golf Club
