If you have a passion for golf then odds are you’ve altered your yard, or the yard of someone close to you, to allow for a modified version of the great game. For me it started nice and easy, the small tree in the front yard was the first hole, the electric box on the other side of the front yard was the second hole, the sprinkler that layed in the middle of the backyard was the third hole, play these three holes 6 times and you have yourself 18 challenging holes. Equiped with a pitching wedge and a few wiffle balls it wasn’t long before the challenging “sprinkler hole” soon turned into a two shot hole…just close the face and rip a draw around the chimney and tap it in for a deuce, no problem.

While using my imagination was fun it would soon lead to trouble. Whiffle balls were soon outdated and the real deal Pinnacles were brought into play, still with a PW in hand I realized that all of my neighbors had trees and sprinklers too. Before I knew it I had 54 of the most challenging holes in the entire South Surrey area. I couldn’t imagine any other course designer in all of Greater Vancouver coming up with a better layout. My course was soon shut down due to some sort of red tape that I call parental zoning restrictions. It seems adults dislike dents in their cars or as I liked to call them, metal hazards (no penalty, free drop). I might have gotten away with it had I not tried to teach myself the flop shot. So I returned to Backyard Golf and Country Club. I took it to the next level when I removed Moms weed whacker from the shed and carefully shortened the grass on the west side of the backyard to create my very first, fully functional, putting and chipping green. It turned out splendidly, I even found a small coffee tin and dug it into the ground, with a hole in the bottom I jammed a broom handle through and tied an old rag from Moms shed to the top. Voila! It didn’t roll very fast….or very true, nor did it look real sharp, in fact it was not a good golf green, but it did make one helluva chipping green. That was until a day or two later when the grass was burnt to a crisp from me weed whacking the life out of it.

As adults, my best friend Shaun and I discovered that somewhere on our continent people were having synthetic turf golf greens installed in their backyards. Could it be? Are there others like us that love golf so fiercely that they would convert a portion of their valued home and garden into a golf play space?! A maintenance-free, perfectly functional version of what I desired to have as a wee child?! We researched the idea, the products, the building techniques and crafted our very first backyard, artificial turf golf green in the summer of 2000 at Mom and Dad Golf Club. It was great. That summer and the years that followed there were endless contests’, course records, night golf, bets won and lost and innumerable victories over the Tiger Woods. My imagination still plays a vital role in my personal golf entertainment.

Since that time, Shaun and I are still doing what we love. A decade later we have over 300 synthetic golf greens installed all over British Columbia. Mostly very customized residential greens but our product is now seen on roof tops, patios, offices, resorts, seniors living complexes, golf courses, driving ranges and common areas in townhouses. We’ve even done about a half-dozen front yards.

Running a business is sometimes not easy but when we are in a backyard on a sunny day having nowhere else to be, there is no better feeling than using our creative potential to mindfully create the breaks of the green, craft its shape, think strategically about pin placements and give a golf green a life that compliments the home it belongs to. We feel happy and honored when the phone rings for us to build another one.