Greetings,
I hope to find everyone is staying warm! The temperatures have been the coldest that I can remember. It looks like we have our first significant snowfall of the New Year moving in as well! This will make everyone happy, because if the temperatures stay low, the new fallen snow will be going nowhere anytime soon.
After the New Year, I started to reflect on 2009 and the many challenges that the year brought to us as a club. The 'Inland Hurricane' on May 8th devastated the whole region. It was very unkind to COGC. After getting my wife and kids to my inlaws at Lake of Egypt, I remember walking the course and seeing the amount of devastation and feeling completely helpless. I had seen Hurricane damage to courses in trade magazines, but never understood the magnitude until May 8th. That evening the game plan on how to attack the restoration at hand was being planned. The details to how we started to restore the course are too great to write about in this blog, but it would not have been accomplished without a tireless effort by my staff, the Pro Shop and Restaurant staffs, the City of Carterville, and the membership volunteers. I have put a slide show of storm pictures below, and I hope that this gives some reflection on what a great place COGC is, because if we can make it through a catastrophe like this, we will be here a long time into the future.
I want to thank all the people that gave their all to insure that COGC remained a Golf Course and did not go quietly into the night.
Shannon
