When Will Stearns III and Will Stearns IV, father-and-son business partners, are sitting in the clubhouse on the grounds of their enterprise, the Southers Marsh Golf Club in Plymouth, perhaps enjoying a cold beer after a long day’s work, looking out at the vast panorama of the golf course and cranberry bog, they don’t see simply a place to play golf and grow cranberries.
They see the fruits of their labor turned into a viable business. They see a plot of land that they love, that they intend on keeping within the family for generations to come, and they see a seemingly endless slew of stories about good times and tough times, and they laugh. That’s the most important thing – they laugh. They look out at that piece of land and think of how much fun they’ve had, and they laugh all the way to the next day, the next challenge, and the next opportunity.
If there were two recurring themes in our conversation with the Stearnses on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the opening of Southers Marsh Golf Club, one was that these guys are fearless in the face of insurmountable work challenges and, second, that these guys know how to have a good time. To add a quick third, they tell a damn fine story.
“I mean, how much fun is building a golf course?” asked Will rhetorically, as if there were only one obvious answer to the question.
We didn’t know what building a golf course was like before sitting down with Stearns and his son, much like anybody who only plays golf and doesn’t build courses would know, but by the end of the conversation, we had a pretty good idea of just how much fun it can be. Of course, fun is a relative term – and working sunup to sundown for more than five years on a project that may or may not take off to a comfortable cruising altitude isn’t exactly everybody’s idea of fun.
The story of the Stearns’ construction of Southers Marsh Golf Club has all the elements of American legend. And in the midst of some of the most difficult times, the story was their driving force, said Will, “The story is almost unbelievable. That’s what’s really kept us going, the story.” It is a story of love and family, hope and loss, hard work, perseverance, tireless dedication, and an unflinching sense of good ol’ American entrepreneurialism.
After all, the Stearns were cranberry farmers, not golf tycoons. “None of us really played golf,” responded Will laughingly. “Yeah, I mean, we played a little, but we were real bad.”
When faced with the challenge of learning how to play golf, some of us may take a lesson with a local pro, others will brave the gauntlet with a set of rental clubs, and some may consider 18 holes at a Rte. 28 pitch-n-putt a formidable test of golf skills. Regardless of how we learn the game, though, we all realize that learning golf is no easy undertaking.
It takes time to learn golf – many hours hitting balls on the range, practicing the seemingly impossible putting game, reading magazines, watching the pros on television, buying the 100 percent guaranteed hole-in-one 7-iron from a late-night infomercial. These are the usual trials and tribulations of a beginning golfer.
For the Stearns family, however, learning to play golf takes on a different kind of methodology – one that doesn’t necessarily include the typical hodgepodge of practice rituals. “In the mid-90’s we were building a new two-acre cranberry bog,” remembered Stearns, “and we had to push a whole bunch of material [dirt, fill, and land] up to get the land where we wanted it to go. So I was thinking, how do I turn all of this into a positive?” he continued. “Why don’t we put two greens on each side of the new bog, and we can hit golf balls back and forth. Yeah, that’ll be fun.”
That’s how Stearns remembers his initial inkling to play golf. He had a newly constructed bog, some excess dirt on either side of it, a notion that golf might be a good way to spend some time, and a desire to turn it all into a positive. If you’re going to bother learning how to play the game, might as well build your own golf course, right?
Over the next couple of years and officially in 1995, those first two greens became a five-hole golf course built exclusively for the Stearns family and friends. There were five holes, but really there were five greens that they played as nine holes. “The biggest green was 1,000 square feet,” said Will Stearns IV, also known as Willy, now Southers Marsh’s part owner and acting superintendent.
“People thought it was ridiculous. And really the golfing aspect was ridiculous – 20 people on your own golf course, and everybody is yelling and heckling each other. We put flowers around the greens to make it look like Augusta. We’d be out there planting annuals and stuff like that. Impatiens around the tees. It was pretty awesome,” Willy continued.
It was this play-it-as-nine, five-hole course that gave the Stearnses their early education on how to build and run a larger-scale facility. They bought equipment from a local used machinery sales outlet and taught themselves how to run fairway mowers and greens mowers to maintain the mini golf course.
By 1995, the thought of converting the cranberry bogs into Southers Marsh Golf Club had not yet come to them. The elder Stearns was still a career cranberry farmer playing golf on his own course for rest and relaxation, and his son was studying mechanical engineering at Harvard University.
When Willy graduated from Harvard, he went to work on the New York mercantile exchange, selling unleaded gasoline and home heating oil. He liked the New York lifestyle and all the benefits that come with such a career, but the “pressure can be unbearable,” observed Will about his son’s days in the Big Apple, “especially for a young guy living above a barn in Hoboken where the rats were the size of horses and as plentiful as the late-night parties.”
Will talked to his son about returning to Plymouth. “I said, ‘Why don’t you come back to the bogs,’ talking to him about the quality of life here and all that stuff. I told him, ‘You can grow cranberries.’ And he decided to come back. He bought himself a house on the bogs, and we all thought he was good to go. Of course, six months later the price of cranberries went from $58 [per barrel] to $8.”
The cranberry crisis that struck like lightning around the time of the new millennium was a desperate time that continues to wreak havoc on the industry today, particularly for Massachusetts cranberry farmers shackled by their inability to expand and compete with the much larger state of Wisconsin.
There are many speculative reasons for the cranberry price plummet of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Most sources agree that it was an issue of oversupply; due to a massive surge in consumer cranberry demand in the late ‘80s, cranberry farming became a popular and profitable way to make a living. There was plenty of cranberry land and plenty of cranberry demand. Also, many land owners in Massachusetts and Wisconsin, the two major cranberry farming regions, were probably attracted to the farming lifestyle like Stearns was, in the face of the hustle and bustle of the urban rigamarole.
The $8 price for a barrel of cranberries simply couldn’t sustain the Stearns family business. A decision needed to be made.
As the patriarch of the family, Will began to think hard about his options. “It’s like, what can you do? We had 116-120 acres of land. What can we do? How do we use it and keep control of it at the same time?” Stearns remembered asking himself.
He and his wife called a family meeting on a Tuesday night in the early months of 2000. “I have three children, two girls and Willy, and I said we’re going to meet again next week and I want everybody to have five ideas about what to do with this land, and we’re going to figure out what we’re going to do.”
Because the Stearnses had already been playing golf on the bogs for five years and they had some preliminary training in how to build tees and greens, there was a unanimous family decision. “Everybody had golf course on their list,” said Stearns.
By all relative estimations, Southers Marsh is a young and small golf course competing in a business full of adult and bigger competition. There are 11 golf courses in the greater Plymouth area, excluding Cape Cod and the Islands, and Southers Marsh is one of the new kids on the block, a track measuring 4,111 yards, par 61, consisting of 11 par 3’s and seven par 4’s.
Don’t let youth and lack of distance fool you. The Southers Marsh experience is about character, cranberries, a restaurant that far surpasses the typical golf course grub, an inexpensive way to enjoy some golf and a bite to eat, and a course that outplays any executive-style layout within a day’s drive of Cape Cod. “A lot of executive-style courses will have you ending up playing par 4’s that are 225 yards. These holes, they are all really golf holes. We are the longest executive course in the area,” assured the younger Stearns.
Will, the club’s hospitality manager, echoed his son’s sentiment with a story about a trend he’s been seeing with couples that come to play Southers Marsh on Sunday afternoons. “You don’t know how many times I’ve seen guys come down here on a Sunday afternoon with their wives. They played a bigger course in the morning, and they figure they’ll take their wives over to Southers Marsh for a nice easy trek. They get out of the car with their Sunday golf bags, and I say to myself, ‘Oh man, these guys are screwed.’ And by the time they get to the fourth hole, they know just how screwed they are.”
The more Stearns and his son talked about their course and their experiences, the more it became apparent that, as the younger Stearns said, “this is a labor of love. We pour our hearts into this thing each and every day.”
They speak like men who are not afraid to take risks, and it is blatantly obvious that the word failure does not exist in the family vocabulary. This golf course is their life, and life to the Stearnses is about working hard and earning the right to enjoy the down time.
And as you might have figured by now, earning, like failure in the Stearns dictionary, is no easy feat. “Ya know, we’re typical Yankee farmers. Anything we can do, we do ourselves,” said Will, and he meant every last letter of the word everything. “You have to learn how to flip burgers and pour a beer at the same time, and after you’re done with that, you have to be here at 5 in the morning to cut greens.”
The majority of the equipment the Stearnses currently use to maintain Southers Marsh was acquired through used inventory reduction sales by their bigger golf course brethren on the Cape, mainly from “two maintenance buildings at Quashnet Valley,” another testament to their adaptability under budget constraints and the mechanical aptitude that comes with operating older - more likely to break down - equipment. Willy conceded that not all the equipment is from used warehouses, but the nice equipment wasn’t an easy prospect. “Once we had the real course, one of the most difficult things was convincing [my father] that we needed to spend maybe $500 on a fairway mover that we’re going to be using 30 hours a week.”
This is the give-and-take of making the major change from full-time cranberry farming to full-time golf course, Will explained. “I mean, you could spend $100,000 on a pump house without batting an eye.” The Southers Marsh pump house, arguably the most important piece of machinery on any golf course, is comprised of the controls from a retired irrigation system and a “30 horsepower engine that spent a year and a half in the town dump” before being revived as the main power supply for watering the course.
Then there’s all the work that comes with changing professions nearly overnight. Since the Stearnses began course construction in the beginning of 2000, the workload has rarely lessened. Will let out a big belly laugh, recalling a common saying of his son’s. “Willy used to say, ‘If you work that many hours, you can have a good day and a bad day all within the same day.’”
Even when Stearns mentions the possibility of having a bad day, it’s hard to believe that he acknowledges such a thing. After abandoning his career as a cranberry farmer, building a golf course on his own, managing the hospitality end on a daily basis, continuing the support of all members of his family, and being able to sit down and tell story after story with an infectious positive attitude, one wonders what could possibly turn a day in the life of Stearns into a bad one.
“Every morning I wake up, I look forward to coming here,” said Will. “I love coming here, and that is the kind of experience we want to bring to our customers. From the time they park their car to the time they leave the driveway, we are doing everything we can to make sure our customers are having a great experience.”
Stearns left us with one more anecdote that revealed both his sense of humor and his unequivocal desire to make sure everybody at Southers Marsh is enjoying themselves as much as he is. “One day these two couples were out on the course playing. I came upon them on the 6th hole, and the two women were absolutely miserable, totally struggling. And I hate that, you know? I want everybody to be happy. So we were having a function that night in the restaurant, and I went and grabbed eight big coconut shrimp, which I think is the nicest appetizer we serve, a bottle of chardonnay and a couple of glasses, and I met up with them on the 8th hole. I said, ‘Why don’t you just let your husbands go play.’ I pulled out a table with a nice tablecloth and served them right there on the edge of the green. They thought they had died and gone to heaven.”
Heaven, Mr. Stearns? Or maybe just another day at Southers Marsh…
When Will Stearns III and Will Stearns IV, father-and-son business partners, are sitting in the clubhouse on the grounds of their enterprise, the Southers Marsh Golf Club in Plymouth, perhaps enjoying a cold beer after a long day’s work, looking out at the vast panorama of the golf course and cranberry bog, they don’t see simply a place to play golf and grow cranberries. 
For the Stearns family, however, learning to play golf takes on a different kind of methodology – one that doesn’t necessarily include the typical hodgepodge of practice rituals. “In the mid-90’s we were building a new two-acre cranberry bog,” remembered Stearns, “and we had to push a whole bunch of material [dirt, fill, and land] up to get the land where we wanted it to go. So I was thinking, how do I turn all of this into a positive?” he continued. “Why don’t we put two greens on each side of the new bog, and we can hit golf balls back and forth. Yeah, that’ll be fun.”
Will talked to his son about returning to Plymouth. “I said, ‘Why don’t you come back to the bogs,’ talking to him about the quality of life here and all that stuff. I told him, ‘You can grow cranberries.’ And he decided to come back. He bought himself a house on the bogs, and we all thought he was good to go. Of course, six months later the price of cranberries went from $58 [per barrel] to $8.” 
The more Stearns and his son talked about their course and their experiences, the more it became apparent that, as the younger Stearns said, “this is a labor of love. We pour our hearts into this thing each and every day.”