WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The new owner of Waubeeka Golf Links has a connection to the course that goes back decades.

 

Not only did Chris Kapiloff learn the game of golf at the South Williamstown facility. He also started learning the business skills that enabled him to purchase the course.

 

"As you may know, I grew up as a neighbor to Waubeeka Golf Links," Kapiloff said this week. "Our back yard touched the second green.

 

"My brother and I spent countless hours collecting golf balls from the river and selling them back to the golfers. We had a little iced tea and lemonade stand on the second hole."

 

On Wednesday, Chris and Peter Kapiloff, along with Steven Nielsen, the president and CEO of Florida-based telecommunications and utility contractor Dycom Industries, closed on a deal to purchase Waubeeka.

 

For the Kapiloff brothers, the ties to the land where Waubeeka sits go even deeper than their days hustling lemonade in their extended back yard.

 

"I was down at the Registry of Deeds and found a record that my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Rhodes, purchased Johnson Farm and another farm nearby of equal size," Kapiloff said. "On Dec. 8 of 1883, my family purchased much of the land the current Waubeeka Golf Links is on.

 

"It's obviously been bought and sold several times since then."

 

The most recent owner and proprietor, Michael Deep, died in August 2022, leading some in the community to wonder whether Waubeeka would follow the path of other Berkshire County golf courses: North Adams Country Club, which closed in 2013, Egremont Country Club (2020), Skyline (2021) and Donnybrook (where the owner announced his intention to close earlier this month).

 

After all, Deep himself, during a 2015 bid for a zoning change that would allow the development of a resort at the property, indicated that without such a change, the course likely would not be able to stay in business for long.

 

"It's very much a small business," Deep told the town's Planning Board. "And there are not very many small businesses in Williamstown that have survived for 50 years. It is an obsolete business model as it stands.

 

"The way to think clearly about it is if it were not to be there, there is zero chance someone would come to Williamstown and incur the capital expenses to construct a golf course as a stand-alone business that has, as a practical matter, three months to make money.

 

"The need is very real."

 

Is this the time to be buying a golf course in Northern Berkshire County?

 

"We're not Zooming, so you can't see how wide I'm smiling," Kapiloff said during a telephone interview. "It's a question I've asked myself a couple of times. I keep coming back to the same answer: Although profit is necessary in order to pay employees, which is obviously a critical part of owning a business, a profit is not my primary reason, or even in the top three reasons that made me go forward.

 

"My family connection both present and past, company building, community involvement — all those things are more important to me than using Waubeeka Golf Links to make lots of money.

 

"It's an important question, but it hasn't been at the center of my reasoning for purchasing it."

 

Kapiloff knows about "company building."

 

"I've been doing it since I was in my early 20s," the owner of Kapiloff Glass said. "If you were to count my first endeavor at Waubeeka, maybe I've been doing it since I was 10 years old.

 

"I've started and grown at least a dozen companies, from small companies that painted houses to much larger ones that manufactured glass around the world. Notably, there was one with a Willams College professor I was involved in founding that served a bunch of universities around the United States.

 

"The excitement of growing a company is still in me, and I'm excited to do that at Waubeeka."

 

Chris Kapiloff will be the member of the ownership group most involved with the day-to-day operations at Waubeeka Golf Links. He described his brother, a partner on other ventures, and Nielsen as "silent partners."

 

Kapiloff's plans to acquire Waubeeka became public knowledge in late October, when he appeared before the Williamstown Select Board for a change in the club's alcohol license. That request came with an extension of the license to include "a beverage cart or carts" to serve alcohol to golfers on the course.

 

The beverage carts are just one innovation Kapiloff hopes to bring to the course.

 

"I want to be able to deliver food to people on the course as they play and have drinks available as they play," he said. "We're also working on several different tournaments we'll be doing in the summer — some will be very traditional golf tournaments, and others will be things that, to me, sound like a lot of fun. One is a Ryder Cup-style tournament with other clubs. Another is a nighttime glow-in-the-dark ball tournament. There are a bunch of different things I feel people love doing. Some are very serious, and some are more on the fun side. Those additions to the club, I feel, will be very good.

 

"For me, and this is true of every business I run, a deep commitment to customer service has to be a defining characteristic of any successful business. I'm looking forward to the upcoming members meeting and talking to all the visitors in and out of the club over the summer to see all the things that are important to them."

 

Kapiloff also hopes to address his "community involvement" priority by finding ways to connect Waubeeka with local charities and find new partnerships in the community.

 

One change he does not plan — at least in the near future — is utilizing the provisions of an overlay zoning district that Deep was able to obtain in a successful vote at town meeting in 2016.

 

"Currently, there has not been any serious talk about pursuing those developments," Kapiloff said. "I think that it may be likely that Waubeeka Golf Links needs some future revenue streams. But for the next couple of years, we plan to concentrate on the golf course and what's happening there."

 

And to hear the longtime entrepreneur talk about his latest business venture, Kapiloff clearly believes that Waubeeka can be self-sustaining.

 

"Yes, there have been other courses closed for various reasons, but Waubeeka Golf Links has a strong membership core and thousands of visitors," he said. "There were something like 16,700 rounds of golf played this year, approximately. I have not verified that data. It's data in the system that the pro produced for me. But given the number of members there, that number is not unreasonable.

 

"Golf, despite a lot of individual circumstances, has been making a bit of a resurgence. I think one of the main reasons golf is surging is that we live in a time and culture where community seems less available than it has in, maybe, forever in our history as a country. People are deeply longing for meaningful relationships. Many self-describe as needing time away from their screens.

 

"Waubeeka has been a place and will continue to be a place to further a business relationship, further a family relationship or just unplug and be by yourself for a couple of hours. I'm hopeful that what Waubeeka provides is what people want."