By: Preston Young
A group of my closest friends and I decided that we were going to start taking golf a little more seriously. Everyone committed to playing regularly, receiving an official handicap, and genuinely trying to improve. All of us have been friends since high school, so naturally, this also gave us another thing to compete over and make fun of each other about.
To be clear, committing to golf did not suddenly make any of us great golfers. It just meant we could officially measure exactly how not great we were.
Late 2025, the idea of taking a real golf trip came up. I planned the weekend and worked with the golf professionals at Turning Stone, the hotel, and their restaurant reservation team to put everything together. Planning a trip for that many people is not always easy, especially when everyone has work schedules and busy lives to consider, but we found a weekend in July that worked.
On Thursday morning, we loaded our golf bags and entirely too much luggage into a rented van, and I drove everyone to Turning Stone Resort in upstate New York. The ride itself was part of the fun. It had been a long time since that many of us had been together with several uninterrupted hours to catch up and laugh about many of the same things we have been laughing about since high school.
We played our first round Thursday afternoon and another on Friday. Then, because we apparently wanted to find out how much golf our bodies could physically handle, we played two rounds on Saturday before driving home Sunday.
Four rounds in three days sounded completely reasonable when we booked it. By the second round Saturday, it felt slightly less reasonable.
The courses were incredible. They were in great condition and far nicer than all of the public courses we normally play. I am certainly not a great golfer, but I played surprisingly well on Friday and Saturday. “Well” is obviously relative, but the ball went where I intended often enough that I left feeling like all the golf and lessons beforehand had actually helped.
We stayed at The Crescent, and the entire setup was even better than we expected. Once we arrived and unloaded the van, we did not need it again until Sunday. Everything was right there. We could get dinner, go to the casino, and find somewhere to hang out after golf without worrying about driving anywhere. Vans would pick us up for golf and we’d show up with our bags already on the carts.
It almost felt like an all inclusive resort, even though it technically was not. That made the weekend incredibly easy, but it may have also created a problem for future trips. Turning Stone set the bar pretty high. It will be difficult to convince everyone that we should go somewhere else if it involves driving back and forth from the hotel every day.
I was proud of how the weekend came together, and I think everyone genuinely enjoyed themselves. At the very least, they have said they would trust me to plan another one. Whether they still feel that way after remembering that I scheduled thirty six holes on Saturday remains to be seen.
More than anything, I appreciated having the entire group together again. All of us have known each other since high school, but life is very different now. Everyone has careers and relationships, and finding a weekend when everyone can get away is already becoming more difficult.
None of us have children yet or many of the larger commitments that may make a trip like this even harder to organize someday. I do not want to take this stage of our lives for granted. Being able to spend an entire weekend with eight of my closest friends is something I thoroughly enjoyed, even if a good portion of it was spent searching for golf balls.
We hope to make the trip an annual tradition. The courses may change, and hopefully our handicaps will too, but getting everyone together is what will make it worth doing again.
Ticket Number: T011361
