The First Tee...
Updated: Aug 30
The idea for Vaca Valley Country Club started in Monterey in December 2022. While visiting, I came across a place called The Links Club. It was a great entertainment experience built around golf, and more importantly, it was a bit of a wake-up call for me. I had never really considered that golf could exist in this kind of environment outside of a traditional course. It opened my eyes to what was possible. You could play, have a drink, bring family or friends, and spend time around the game without everything having to revolve around a serious four- or five-hour round.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good competitive round of golf. But things changed once my first son was born earlier that year. Time became different, priorities shifted, and I started thinking more about how golf could fit into family life instead of always having to plan family life around golf. At the same time, my father was getting older and spending less time on the course, which gave the idea even more meaning. I liked the thought of creating another way for different generations to share the game together.
The idea stuck with me. I still make it back to The Links Club a couple of times a year, and over time I have taken family and friends there too. A lot of those visits turned into conversations about what I was trying to build, what worked, what I might do differently, and whether my idea was completely crazy.
With encouragement from my wife and my father, I decided to take a risk and bet on myself. By July 2023, the business was formed and the idea started becoming real. I never imagined it would take nearly three years before we would finally be in a position to really start building. There were plenty of times along the way when it felt like we were close, only to hit another roadblock and watch the finish line move again.
The vision was always a private club. Not a replacement for the golf course, and not just a place to rent a simulator by the hour. I wanted to create another place for people who really enjoy the game.
Golf is incredibly social, but it can still be surprisingly hard to meet other golfers. Most of the time you show up with your group, play four hours with the same people, and leave. You may occasionally get paired with someone new, but there is not always much opportunity to become part of a larger golf community.
Golf has always felt a little intimidating to me — maybe that comes with being a bogey golfer. I picked up golf in college and played pretty inconsistently for years after. Over time, though, the more I played and learned about the game, the more my appreciation for its traditions, competition, and everything that surrounds it continued to grow.
It’s hard to beat taking a few dollars from your friends after spending the first 15 minutes arguing over the game — dots, skins, match play, side bets, too many strokes, double the back, automatic presses, three-putt money, and whatever other rule somebody swears was agreed to on the first tee. My golf circle has never really grown much, even though my love for the game has. That is part of what I want VVCC to help with.
I want it to be the kind of place where you naturally start recognizing people. You hear about an upcoming tournament, watch the end of someone else’s match, get invited into a game, or end up having a drink with someone you have seen around the club a few times.
While the project was taking shape, our second child was born in 2024, and my father’s health declined. He passed away in 2025. That changed the project for me. Part of the original reason for building VVCC was to create another way for us to spend time together around golf, and after he passed I questioned whether I still wanted to keep going.
Eventually, I realized that I did.
What I could see more clearly was a place where golf gave people a reason to spend time together — parents with their kids, adults still getting to play with their parents, friends competing against each other, and people who may not have known each other before joining the club eventually sharing a round, a drink, or a game.
The vision has gotten clearer over time, but I don’t think it is finished. There are still decisions to make, and there are things that will continue to evolve. One of the most important pieces now is talking with potential members — understanding what they are looking for, what they feel is missing, and what would actually make the club valuable to them.
The business plan is there. The space is being built. The ideas are there. But it is not really a club until people make it one. There are plenty of ideas for where VVCC can go from here — tournaments, competitions, events, traditions, and probably a few things we haven’t thought of yet. For now, the goal is simpler: build a place people enjoy being, bring together the right group of people, and give it time to become its own thing.
That’s why we’re building VVCC.
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