NEW YORK — Half-empty bays. Quiet weekday afternoons. A range that fills up for exactly two hours on a Saturday and sits idle the rest of the week.
Ask most municipal golf directors about it and you’ll get the same answer: that’s just what public golf is. Budgets are fixed, staff are stretched, and the assumption is baked in, public facilities serve the community, they don’t perform.
Kelley Brooke didn’t accept that.
Brooke runs Bethpage State Park, one of the most storied public golf facilities in the country, home to five courses and a US Open pedigree that most private clubs would trade for. When she looked at what her range was actually doing on an average Tuesday, she saw the same gap every public operator sees: capacity nobody was using.
Three months in, it is already one of the busiest municipal ranges in the world, running at roughly 750,000 balls hit per month across only 24 bays. That’s not a one off, this is the third facility in her portfolio to show this performance with a fourth, Pine Ridge Golf Club going live at the end of summer.
Three installs. Same operator. Same question each time: what is she seeing that other public facilities aren’t?
“Everyone assumes a public facility just doesn’t have the demand,” said Kelley, the managing partner at Bethpage Black, Harbor Links and Montauk Downs. “What I found at Montauk Downs, and then again at Harbor Links, is that the demand was already there — we just couldn’t see where it was going unused.
“Inrange gave us that visibility, bay-by-bay, hour to hour. Once you can see it, running a public range isn’t that different from running any other business. You fix what’s empty.”
The pattern across all three venues isn’t a single piece of technology. It’s Brooke pairing ball-tracking data with structural changes to how the range is run, using Inrange alongside SelectPi and Cover the Tees to see, in real time, where bays sit empty and why. The tech doesn’t explain the turnaround on its own.
It’s the triage layer that lets Kelley see the problem clearly enough to fix it three times in a row.
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