Ibis Golf & Country Club Director of Sports, Chuck Gill discusses how the Green Tennis Machine has created a “Fountain of Youth” for tennis balls

Chuck is a member of both the PTR and USPTA, and highly involved in the USPTA Florida Division and recently spoke about “Budgeting & Finance” at the PTR Tennis Directors Conference.

Ibis Golf & Country Club recently won the 2014 CMAA Idea Fair for their “Cost Savings” via the Green Tennis Machine. Ibis will be saving over $4,000 each year as a result of successfully implementing the use of a Green Tennis Machine.

A full transcript of the unpaid Ibis Golf & Country Club testimonial video is here:

Hey, my name it’s Chuck Gil. I’m the Director of Sports at the Ibis Golf & Country Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. I’ve been the Director of Sports at the Ibis Golf & Country Club for 18 years now. We’ve got a 3,500 member equity club with 3 Jack Nicklaus golf courses, 14 tennis courts, a full fitness center.

Well, I think [buying a Green Tennis Machine] is a no brainer. It’s a great machine. It does exactly what it says. It puts the bounce back into the balls. Your members are happier because you have a better quality teaching ball. Your pros are happier because they don’t have to listen to their members talk about not having a great quality teaching ball. At the end of the day it’s great for the club because it saves money.

I’ve been using it for the compression balls and for the youth tennis balls as well. It seems to work just as well. We use standard teaching balls from a number of different companies. We found that by using a high quality the Tour ball, instead of having it go dead in 6 weeks or so. Now we’re getting, jeez, we’re getting 6 months out of it.

I saw the Green Machine at a tradeshow once and I was pretty interested in it because No. 1 it’s as you say it goes green which I think is very important. Also I was really interesting in the cost savings, because I thought it would be a great way for me to save some of the money. We have 6 teaching pros at Ibis. So we spend quite a bit of money on practice balls. The members always like to make sure the practice balls are in pretty good shape.

Well, when we bought the machine, we were expecting to do a 2 year return on the investment and really get our money back within 2 years. It’s actually been accelerating. It looks like our ROI on the machine is going to be in a little less than 18 months.

The recent CMAA which is the Club Manager Association idea fair, Ibis Golf & Country Club needed to enter a cost saving measure at the club. So our club decided to use the Green Machine as our way of going green and cutting costs. Actually when I put out the ROI on the machine we actually got first place.

At first I was laughing because I had heard some people and gotten some recommendations that it worked. We were laughing. I said, jeez, this is like the fountain of youth for our tennis balls, especially on the clay courts in Florida where you really don’t rub the nap off as well. You can be able to maintain the life of them for, we’ve had some balls that are now in the fourth cycle and they’re playing just like new. So it’s been great.

Learn more about the GTMs here and Ibis Golf & Country Club here