How husband and wife members saved Freeport Club golf course

No one wanted The Freeport Club five years ago.

Not even the current owners.

“It was sort of accidental,” said JR Schaffner, who bought the course with her husband, Steve Fritz.

Here is the story of how two former members at the country club brought one of the area’s best and most unique courses back to life — and how it might be just the start.

The backstory

The oldest golf course in northwest Illinois — it opened, albeit with only six holes, in 1893, six years before Rockford Country Club — had already been saved once. Oliphant Golf Management made the failing country club a public course in 2016. Golfers raved about it. Ken Lee, a four-time Winnebago County Amateur champion, said “everybody should play it.” But most golfers never even seemed to realize this thickly wooded course with several huge, steep hills tucked next to Krape Park was open to the public.

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Four years later, it was for sale again. The Freeport Park District, which already has a a top-notch 36-hole facility only two miles away at Park Hills, didn’t want another course. So it was offered in an auction to any stock holder who wanted to take over the debt and buy it.

“We put a minimum bid in because we had a house on the course and the course is too good to lose,” said Fritz, who put his grandson, Connor Shoemaker, in charge of golf operations.

“Part of the reason we put the minimum bid in was because Connor had interest in golf,” said Fritz, who along with his wife owns Inertia Machine Corporation, which makes rock crushers. “We thought it was going to be an adventure. We have had Inertia for 30 years. That was getting pretty boring. We liked the challenge of doing the impossible, starting something from scratch that works again.”

And it is working again. Other Rockford-area golf courses that have tried to go public in the last 20 years failed. Bel-Mar Country Club in Belvidere and Oregon Country Club are now empty fields. Although Fairways in Rochelle has stayed open.

The comeback begins

The Freeport Club, on the other hand, is beginning to thrive, growing from 40 members at its ebb to almost 350 today.

“The community has done backbends for us,” Schaffner said. “They believed in the vision. They didn’t want to see anything happen to the property.”

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Corporate sponsorships, with local advertisers paying $5,000 to put signs on a hole and get four season memberships for employees, helped the course get through its first year. It did. Almost breaking even. That saved the top floor of the clubhouse, which offers a spectacular view of a golf course that features some of the largest hills on any course in Illinois.

“I thought if we could break even in the first year, it would justify putting the capital in to make improvements over the next five years and do all the deferred maintenance that hadn’t been done over the last 30 years,” Fritz said. “The other option if we barely broke even on the golf is we would have put four condos upstairs. We would have been able to get all of our money back that way so we could focus on the golf course. That was the back-up plan.”

His wife had grand plans for the upstairs. But she’d never get that chance if the golf course didn’t work first.

“This was a three-phase plan,” Schaffner said. “The first phase was we had to get some golfers in here.”

“The hardest thing,” Fritz said, “was for people to get past the perception they had for 30 or 40 years. It had been a private club for so long, people in the community didn’t want to play golf here because they thought it was too stuffy.”

The best way around that? They dropped the price. A lot. The Freeport Club ranks with Aldeen and PrairieView, and perhaps Park Hills West, as the best public course in the Rockford area. But a season pass including a cart costs $875 at The Freeport Club compared to $1,400 at PrairieView and $1,850 for a Rockford Park District pass. Even Freeport’s municipal Park Hills courses charge $1,335 for a season pass that includes a cart. It also only charges $40 (including a cart) on weekdays and $30 on Mondays.

“We had to get golfers in there,” Fritz said. “And in order to get that, we had to lower the price considerably for memberships. They’ve got to get relationships and get their groups together and have social time here and their wives coming out on Friday evening and Sunday afternoon and do that for a few years so that’s ingrained in them.

“We’re now close to the max number of memberships that we want, so we will gradually increase $50 a year until we get our annual rate more to what it should be. The ideal number to make everything a lot less stressful would be closer to $1,200 to $1,500 for memberships.”

A club atmosphere

Fritz said he is just now getting the 6,365-yard, par-70 golf course into  “the PrairieView” level of shape that he wants. They have also poured money into the building, completely gutting and remodeling the upstairs, redoing the locker rooms, putting on a new roof and adding a pair of golf simulators. 

The new owners went through a trial-and-error process on the social side of their business with the downstairs bar/restaurant and the 250-seat upstairs dining facility.

“There is no comparison,” Schaffner said of running a rock crushing business and a golf club. “We always say in manufacturing you are chasing thousands and in food and beverage you are chasing nickels. Freeport is very, very competitive in the food and beverage. It’s a big deal here if your beer costs 25 cents more than the guy down the road. It is much more difficult to make a living.”

It took a couple of years, but they learned to turn the upstairs and downstairs into different businesses. Downstairs is now a sports bar, with a 150-inch TV. Upstairs has become an event center, featuring one of the best views in Freeport, looking down on the course. That room used to loom as the biggest drain on finances. Now, completely remodeled, it could be the biggest earner. Erica Winter, who manages the upstairs, said they have entertained “thousands” there in the last two months. That includes a regular Friday night “sophisticated” happy hour with music.

“We do baby showers and wedding showers, birthday parties, anniversary parties, class reunions, celebrations of life, graduation parties and wedding receptions,” Winter said. “We even have had a couple of enquiries for prom in the next couple of years. I like to have them come out and check the space so they can see it all. That’s 90 percent of the sale. It’s such a beautiful view up there.”

“It would have made nice condos, though,” Fritz said.

“He’s serious,” Schaffner said. “That was one of the few arguments about this place that I actually won.And now even he will tell you it’s really adding to the value and what we think we can do here.”

This was the third phase of the three-phase plan, after getting more golfers to come and then making it “more livable” for them with a few renovations.

Now the only thing left is to get even more golfers to  play their course — many for the first time.

“A lot of people haven’t played our course because they don’t know about it,” Fritz said. “This year we had a guy ask another member to sponsor him because he thought it was still a private country club. And it’s five years later! That’s the biggest thing we have had to try to break down.

“Anybody can golf here,” Schaffner said. “Anybody can come to happy hour. Anybody can rent the facility. That’s the message we are continually working on.”

“That’s the hardest thing to get out,” Fritz said, “that it is open to the public. You don’t have to be wealthy to come out to the Freeport Club.”

Matt Trowbridge is a Rockford Register Star sports reporter. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, at @MattTrowbridge.