Summer is the time to hit the links and enjoy rounds of golf with friends and family. The growth of the sport has taken off since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Every golfer has one goal when they step up to the tee.

“I'm normally a 14-handicap, so 80 would be great,” golfer Nancy Rodriguez said.

“I hope I have a good score today,” added golfer Douglas Day.

Golf has long been a game Day has loved.

“My grandparents would come up to the Adirondacks every summer," Day said. "We had a house that we would stay at in the Adirondacks, so they taught me golf. I had a hole-in-one when I was 12 years old in Saranac Lake, and it's just continued ever since then. I just love the game.”

But scheduling rounds and making hotel reservations isn’t always the easiest. That’s where Rod Christian comes into play. He founded New York Golf Trails 12 years ago. He and his group take the stress out of the game, letting the golfers focus on the sport. It turned from a basement hobby into the largest golf trail in the country and the only one of its kind in the Northeast.

“The first year I did it, I booked six trips and I had no experience in it at all," Christian said. "So it was kind of a big learning curve for me. And right now, here we are, I guess about a dozen years later, we've already booked over 300 trips this year and 7,000 rounds of golf. Our slogan is 'Golf trips made easy.' And we've had a lot of our groups say exactly that to us that, you know. We take care of everything. We make our group leaders look like heroes.”

It’s been met with open arms.

"It's a great deal, you know, the hotel and golf and cart, and it's just a great deal," Day said. "And you can go to different places after we do this trip. I'm going to go with a golf buddy to Cooperstown over the New York Golf Trails. So it's just such a great deal and there's just so many great courses in New York.”

“The ladies are able to pay their own payments through the app and they continue contact with me on how things were going. And I was able to get questions answered easily," Rodriguez added. "Then calling different golf courses and nothing was canceled. There's times when I had set up groups and then all of a sudden, I get here and there was no tee times available for us.”

By showcasing courses, it keeps golfers local, rather than making trips out of state.

"I love it here, you know, playing golf in New York everywhere you go, Adirondacks, Syracuse, Rochester, we've played in, you know, over Niagara Falls and Buffalo and just a lot of great places to play,” Day said.

And that is what Christian and his group hang their hats on.

“Upstate New York has so much to offer," Christian said. "I've always been a huge fan and obviously always been a huge fan of golf and love golf. So putting those two together is just made my hobby. I'm really blessed to have a hobby that I love. It's turned into a full-time job.”