No foolin’ as Shooters opens for season

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While it may not look much like golf season looking out the window but at least one city golf course is getting ready to open its driving range on April Fools’ Day on Monday with the course opening next week.

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Shooters Family Golf Centre & Restaurant will open its driving range officially on Monday at 10 a.m., and if the forecast stays the way it’s looking for an anticipated opening date of April 10 for its executive 18-hole golf course.

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“It feels like an April Fools’ joke at this point,” said Amy Cerasani, Shooters Events Coordinator & Food Services Manager on Sunday. “We’ll officially open (Monday) for the 2024 season although we finished golf in December, we opened the range in January and then for a couple of days in February and (we were) hitting balls in March. So really we haven’t technically closed for the season because of the mild winter.

“We will officially start the 2024 season (Monday).”

It marks the first time that Shooters has managed to give Winnipeg golfers the opportunity to golf outside all 12 months of the year.

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“It’s absolutely a first for us,” said Cerasani. “Thirty-one years we are going into and it’s definitely the first that we’ve had guys golfing every single month of the year.”

The phone has been ringing at the golf course every day from regulars asking when the driving range and course was going to open. Now the staff can finally give them an answer.

“Most of the snow I would say is gone,” said Cerasani. “We obviously didn’t get a whole lot this winter so it’s mainly just the ice patches and stuff that we have to melt away now.”

A fixture on north Main Street near the Perimeter, Shooters will open its driving range 10 days earlier than last year. Typically, they try to get the driving range open by the last week in March or first week of April, said Cerasani.

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“So we’re right kind of on time,” said Cerasani. “We were looking at clips from old news broadcasts (Saturday) and how much snow we had at this time last year and it’s mind-boggling. When you say we opened April 11, that snow all melted in 10 days.”

Cerasani figures about 95% of the driving range is clear of snow.

“We actually fired up the picker (Sunday) to go and collect balls because when they hit balls in January, February and March they were hitting into snowbanks. So now that that snow has all been melted we were able to go retrieve those balls in anticipation of a busy day (Monday).”

gdawkins@postmedia.com

X: @SunGlenDawkins

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