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Hey, my name it's Chuck Gill.
I'm the Director of Sports at the Ibis Golf & Country Club
in West Palm Beach, Florida.
I've been the Director of Sports
at the Ibis Golf & Country Club for 18 years now.
We've got a 3,500 member equity club with 3 [Jack] Nicklaus golf courses,
14 tennis courts, a full fitness center.
Well, I think it's [the Green Tennis Machine] a no brainer.
It's a great machine.
It does exactly what it says.
It puts the bounce back into the balls.
Your members are happier because you have a better quality teaching ball.
Your pros are happier because they don't have to listen to their members
talk about not having a great quality teaching ball.
At the end of the day it's great for the club because it saves money.
I've been using it for the compression balls
and for the youth tennis balls as well.
It seems to work just as well.
We use standard teaching balls from a number of different companies.
We found that by using a high quality the Tour ball,
instead of having it go dead in 6 weeks or so.
Now we're getting, jeez, we're getting 6 months out of it.
I saw the Green Machine at a tradeshow once
and I was pretty interested in it
because No. 1 it's as you say it goes green
which I think is very important.
Also I was really interesting in the cost savings,
because I thought it would be a great way
for me to save some of the money.
We have 6 teaching pros at Ibis.
So we spend quite a bit of money on practice balls.
The members always like to make sure the practice balls
are in pretty good shape.
Well, when we bought the machine,
we were expecting to do a 2 year return on the investment
and really get our money back within 2 years.
It's actually been accelerated.
It looks like our ROI on the machine is going to be
in a little less than 18 months.
The recent CMAA which is the Club Manager Association Idea Fair,
we needed to enter a cost saving measure at the club.
So our club decided to use the Green Machine
as our way of going green and cutting costs.
Actually when I put out the ROI on the machine
we actually got first place.
At first I was laughing because I had heard some people
and gotten some recommendations that it worked.
We were laughing.
I said, jeez, this is like the fountain of youth
for our tennis balls,
especially on the clay courts in Florida where you really
don't rub the nap off as well.
You can be able to maintain the life of them for,
we've had some balls that are now in the fourth cycle
and they're playing just like new.
So it's been great.