Dinaland Golf Course Superintendent Chad Shafer was met with quite a sight on Friday morning due to the handiwork of what appears to be several vandals. Sometime late Thursday night/early Friday morning vandals chose the golf course as the target for their fun. According to Shafer, carts were used to joyride around the golf course causing damage, knocking signs and posts out of the ground, driving donuts on the greens, tearing up grass and eventually driving the carts into the ponds, fully submerging them. The range cart was dumped in the number 6 pond. A fleet cart was dumped in the number 13 pond. The number 6 green as well as the number 13, 14, and 17 greens were damaged from driving donuts on them. Roped off areas had the ropes ripped away and strewn around the course. Two different tee signs were knocked out of the ground completely. “Those are in cement so it took some force to get them out,” shares Shafer. “I suspect they ran them over with force. There was quite a bit of damage throughout the course and with labor and damage to the golf carts I suspect there is about $10,000 dollars worth of damage. It will take a lot of labor to get things fixed up.” Shafer says thankfully no actual sod was pulled up and so they hope by late next week the greens will be fairly healed up from the damage. Unfortunately, the tournaments they had lined up on Friday and Saturday just had to deal with the damaged course. The Naples Police Department is conducting an investigation and Shafer as well as many others hope the culprits are found. “Hopefully someone will come forward,” says Shafer. “It’s hard enough to maintain a golf course under an ideal situation and then you add in vandals like this and it makes it much harder. It affects many people and is just not fair to the golfing public.” Anyone with information about activity on or around the Dinaland Golf Course on the night of May 3rd is asked to contact the Naples Police Department.
