We attended the 2008 edition of the Minnesota Wild season ticket holder select-a-seat event at the Xcel Energy Center earlier this week.

The good news for the new owner: very few open seats this year. The upper ends were sold out (as usual) and the upper sides had only scattered single seats available. The club level had surprisingly few open seats (so much for the recession) and the only reasonable supply of seats were lower level ends and corners on the side the Wild shoot at once.

Some other notes:

• The prospects were on the ice when we first arrived and were supposed to come up and sign autographs, but they still weren’t there by the time we left.
• Suite #56 was open for inspection, which was fun to see, but I was disappointed to see that they removed the 23-inch Cinema displays, though.
• While sitting in some seats on the club level, a very nervous gentleman purchased four of them ($12,300 – ouch).
• Free ice cream and Zamboni pictures were nice, as were the 30-percent-off coupons to the Hockey Lodge.
• My relatives kept their same seats, so I’ll wait and see if the Wild offer them the open single next to them for half price again.
• The “discount” at the River Centre parking ramp wasn’t so special – $7 instead of $10. How about free for the people spending thousands of dollars?

More on the prospects soon…

Today we paid a visit to our friend Jack Baker, manager of Summit Golf Club, located just west of Cannon Falls on Highway 19. Jack is one of the nicest course managers you’ll ever meet and he manages one of my favorite south metro courses.

Jack reported that the year started off slow in April when winter didn’t want to leave. The snow birds from Florida and Arizona were slow to return and it took him ten days after opening before they had a single senior play the course. Traffic has improved each month since then, however, and the parking lot was full when we left around noon.

I had heard rumors that they might be suffering some of the same issues that we talked about regarding Wendigo (lack of revenue impacting course conditioning), but I thought the course was in excellent shape. With all bentgrass tees, fairways and greens, Summit is an expensive course to maintain.

This is not an easy course, but there are many unique holes that keep us coming back. If you haven’t played the Summit, give it a try and let us know what you think.

7MM Summit Golf Club Photo Gallery