CLUBCALL
CLUB CALL
BY KERRY LUFT
86
IF YOU BUILD IT
JIMBO GEISLER HAS BIG PLANS FOR LOUISIANA’S COVEY RISE LODGE – STARTING WITH THE SOUTH CENTRAL REGIONAL
C
ovey Rise Lodge in south Louisiana is many things to many people. Epicures know it as a specialty farm that provides heirloom produce for many of New Orleans’ finest restaurants. For others, it’s a weekend retreat from urban life. Hunters know it as a preserve specializing in quail, pheasant, chukar partridge and flighted mallards. Above all, as one member offered without prompting, it’s a place where “they really take care of you.”
CLAYSHOOTINGUSA
Sporting clays shooters are about to know it as something else—a premier destination capable of hosting some of the sport’s largest events, starting in September with the NSCA’s South Central Regional and American Field Sporting Gamebore Classic. It’s a rapid and thorough transformation. Though it has hosted Louisiana state sporting clays championships, Covey Rise’s day-to-day clay target program has been limited to
skeet, 5-stand and a small, scenic course nestled amid tall pine trees. But six months before the regional, changes were afoot all over the property’s 600 acres. The framing of a new, 8,000-square-foot dining and meeting facility was in full swing, while not far away, endless loads of clay and gravel had been scooped from the land, creating and enlarging ponds and providing raw material for more than a mile of cart paths wending through fields studded with majestic live oaks. At the middle of it all was owner Jimbo Geisler, a dynamo whose favorite phrase is, “I had an idea.”
