GOODSOIL, Sask. — The Sopracolle family’s cattle once roamed over the rolling hills and through the virgin forest that now decorate an 18-hole golf course.
Northern Meadows Golf Club was an unusual vision for diversification in a part of Saskatchewan that has long been a tough slog for farming.
“It’s been a tough uphill struggle from the 1930s on,” said family patriarch Frank Sopracolle.
Sopracolle came to the Goodsoil area as a child with his parents in 1930. The area was cold, variously too dry and too wet, and had a short growing season. It pushed away most of the original settlers, but the Sopracolles gutted it out.
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By the late 1950s, people began to rediscover the region as a summer haven for holidays. In the early 1960s, the province declared the neighbouring lake district a provincial park, which has become increasingly popular.
Meadow Lake Provincial Park is dotted with clear water swimming lakes, good fishing lakes and natural campsites , but no golf course.
In the 1980s, the Lions Club in Goodsoil, which is perched at the southwest edge of the park, began to investigate the possibility of establishing a golf course there, but decided against it after performing a feasibility study.
Sopracolle was not daunted by the study’s findings. By the late 1980s, he was seriously considering building a course on part of his land.
All things pointed to a need for diversification: the Crow Benefit transportation subsidy was eliminated in 1995; northwestern Saskatchewan was in the middle of a long drought; crop prices were terrible; and farmers in the area were moving into ranching as they watched their crops wither.
That was enough for Sopracolle. He decided to go ahead with his idea on the stony acres dedicated to cattle abutting a little lake on the south end of his land.
Daughter Louise, and her husband, Ken Olan, and son, Joe, and his wife, Mary Jean, bought into the vision.
They, along with Sopracolle and his wife, Phil, began to plan the course.
“The golf course was considered a crazy idea of mine, especially by the bankers and the locals,” he said.
It took a massive amount of paperwork to get the necessary government approvals, but the work began in 1996. Designing and creating a golf course was easier said than done.
For instance, they needed a scraper to take out the pieces of forest that still stood on the fairways. Such a scraper cost $100,000 new, which was outside the family’s development budget.
Joe Sopracolle found a vintage model in Manitoba and took along a mechanic to check it out.
They brought it back on a trailer, but both motors blew within two weeks.
However, Joe has a reputation for fixing machinery. He ripped out the wiring, put in two new motors and finished the landscaping.
“I think it’s still running today,” said Ken Olan. “We sold it to a gravel pit.”
They had a financing scare in 1998, but in August of that year, the first nine holes opened, stretching out from the old farmhouse that served as a pro shop.
The next year, the revamped and expanded house became a five-room bed and breakfast and pro shop as well as a full service restaurant that today is jammed on Sundays for brunch.
The golf course is now a full 18 holes, with the back nine opening in July 2005. Many privately owned cabins surround the course and Bousquet Lake, plus six cabins for rent and a 29-site RV park.
Land sales in the area began to pick up in the mid-2000s, partly because the provincial park was — at least temporarily — full, said Olan. There was also a movement toward buying vacation homes at the time.
“That peaked in 2007. We sold 50 lots in one year,” he said.
Yet the Sopracolle adventure continues. The newest development comes courtesy of Frank’s other daughters, who have started selling condominiums under the name of Pristine Ridge.
The family slowly moved out of farming over the years as the golf course became busier and land sales started to pick up. Some of the land was sold and some rented.
But running a golf course and resort is similar to farming, said Louise Olan.
“It’s very time consuming and demanding, just like farming,” she said.
A golf course is seasonal, demands long hours, requires fertilization and plenty of water, needs large amounts of specialized equipment and is highly dependent on weather and gas prices.
Vacationers flock to the course in the summer, coming from Lac Des Isles, Greig Lake and many other area lakes. The fall clientele is largely farmers, who come out for their holidays.
“I’m glad it has materialized, and it’s going well,” said Frank.
“At least, that’s what the boss tells me,” he added, pointing at his son-in-law.
For Olan, once a successful engineer in Saskatoon and the family member most unused to living on the land, moving to Goodsoil and taking on the management of the course has been fantastic.
“I couldn’t imagine going back to a desk. There are a lot of long days, but a lot of rewards.”
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