East Hartford Golf Club

This is a strange one. Longhill has been owned by the town of East Hartford for many years and has always been an affordable muni. A year or two ago it was taken over by pretty successful company in Connecticut called MDM. They run the beautiful Gillette Ridge and a few other local courses. We've played most of their courses and have always been treated very well... with the exception of Longhill.

We sometimes play with one of several discount offers we usually purchase over the internet. We have played at Longhill 2 times over the past two years and each time we made tee times and showed up with our discount information about 20 minutes prior to our tee time. Both times the pro shop official accepted our payment but told us there would be a delay and asked us to go to the practice green to wait.

Strange thing is that both times there was no one on the tee while we killed time on the putting green. There was also no group ahead on the first hole. Then about 5 or 10 minutes after our tee time passed a group showed up to tee off. After they were off the tee we were told we could start. Our group generally shoots in the upper 70's low 80's and we like to move fast if possible. Sadly both times this happened we ended up behind a very slow moving group with no desire to let us play through. We had an almost identical experience both times we played almost one year apart!

There is no ranger here and no starter. It really appeared to us that the pro shop manager here resented us because we were getting a discount. We've used these same promotional deals at other MDM courses without any problem.

On one of our Longhill rounds we went in after for drinks. While we drank we saw the same manager getting extremely angry with an employee within earshot of us and other patrons.

I work in management and I can say with certainty that it is considered very unprofessional to get this irate with an employee in public and also in front of other employees.

I have been taught that the customer is king and the purpose of running a promotional event or offer is to introduce new customers to the product in a most pleasant fashion. Our initial Longhill experience has been far from pleasant and I'm not sure we will return.

The course itself was not terrible. Not difficult and wide open. You can slice or hook on most holes and not get into trouble. The weird thing is I have heard that they removed many trees this past winter. Over 100 I have been told. I would like to see it now because this course was wide open before so I can't imagine what it looks like now. I think this tree removal project may be a mistake if true. I hope someone else can leave a comment here about these issues with Longhill.

Course was OK: greens were in good shape, tees were really chewed up, fairways were rough, and the rough is real thick. Alot of holes are right on top of each other, with lots of balls flying around. Price was right, $ 25.00 with cart.