Ledgeview Picking Up The Pieces After Devastating Clubhouse Fire
The Top Floor Of The Clubhouse At Ledgeview Is A Total Loss. Some Memorabilia Was Saved By The Firemen On The Scene - Image Courtesy James Lepp
By Brad Ziemer, British Columbia Golf
The clubhouse is gone, but 18 holes that have helped produce so many wonderful players over the years remain at Ledgeview Golf Club. The members of the Abbotsford course are still trying to come to grips with the April 19 fire that completely destroyed the top floor of their clubhouse. They know the club faces some hard work over the next number of months, but are hopeful that something positive will emerge from this.
“I expect something good to come out of this for sure,” said Phil Dodd, president of the club’s board of directors. “It is going to be a bit of a rocky road for at least the next six, eight weeks, but we will get a temporary structure of some type up and we expect to be fully operational and successful moving forward. “In the short-term we will have to roll up our sleeves and work hard, but beyond that I think it will be positive. It’s just a real inconvenience and a real problem right now.”
Dodd said the club has been heartened by the support it has received from the Abbotsford community, as well as golf clubs from around the province. “The support we are getting is actually really encouraging because all these courses are asking their players to come out and play Ledgeview to support us,” Dodd said. “It has been really nice.”
Ledgeview is renowned for producing a long list of excellent players. Two of its products, Nick Taylor and Adam Hadwin, are current PGA TOUR members. James Lepp had a storied amateur career that included a NCAA Championship while attending the University of Washington and before that Ray Stewart was a PGA TOUR member and was part of Canada’s winning team at the 1994 Dunhill Cup.
Dodd credits the Abbotsford fire department with helping to save some of the memorabilia donated by those four players from the Ledgeview pro shop. “The (golf) bags from Nick and Adam and Lepp and Ray, they were all saved and Ray’s irons from the Dunhill were also saved,” Dodd said.
“So those things are still okay, but a lot of the documentation like record scorecards from Nick and some of the news articles and frames and stuff like that from Ray and some of the other people are all gone. The fire department told me yesterday that maybe some of the club trophies and things like that might be salvageable.”
At Least Some Memorabilia From The Clubhouse Was Rescued
Taylor, who happens to be Dodd’s son-in-law, said he was shocked to learn about the fire. He is in San Antonio, Tex., where he is competing in the Valero Texas Open. “I couldn’t believe it at first,” Taylor said in a telephone interview. “I was just shocked. It is such a shame to lose some of the memorabilia. There are just so many memories there and for it to end that way is sad. A lot of us former junior members kind of grew up upstairs in the clubhouse. And I used to work in the back shop there as well.”
The hope is that Ledgeview, which is owned by the City of Abbotsford and run by a volunteer golf society, will get a new clubhouse that it has desperately needed for years. “If there’s a silver lining, that’s it,” Taylor said.
“The clubhouse was originally an old farmhouse,” Dodd added. “Probably 30 per cent of the original building was built in the ‘60s. It was really, really old and all of the additions, like the banquet room, are close to 35 or 45 years old as well. Collectively, the structure was probably over 50 years old.”
The immediate challenge for Ledgeview is to get a temporary structure in place. The course has been operating out of the parking lot since the fire. “We don’t have access to the site yet, so we have been operating on a shoestring in terms of trying to find a place to process payments and green fees and stuff like that,” Dodd said.
“We have got a travel trailer that Traveland donated for us and we dropped that in the parking lot. We've got some point of sale stuff set up and we are going to have a couple of tents delivered today. We had some portable washroom buildings delivered yesterday, so we are set up for golfers.
“Now it becomes a matter of how long the investigation is going to take, how long it is going to take to determine whether or not the building is officially a write-off. In my opinion it is unrepairable and then beyond that we certainly have to work with the City of Abbotsford and our insurance carriers and determine what we are going to do as far as building a new clubhouse and the timeline and all the rest of it.”
A new clubhouse likely would not be completed for at least another 18 months. In the meantime, the club needs a temporary structure that will allow it to meet its commitments for tournaments, including this year’s B.C. Summer Games in late July. “We have some other long-term clients that have had tournaments here for 35 years and we want to make sure that we have something that they can come to this summer,” Dodd said.
In the meantime, the course remains open for public play. “The course is in great shape,” Dodd said. “We do intend to still operate and we do intend to still sell beer and beverages and food and stuff like that. It is just going to take a little bit of time to get everything sorted out. Hopefully, we can get all this hammered out in the next few weeks.”