All Golf, All The Time Rinas Selling Access To The Game

As He Adds A Second Skramble House Of Golf In King Of Prussia

By Tom McNichol, Contributing Writer

Everywhere you turn in the world of golf, you can’t help but hear about growing the game.

Justin Rinas has always had some very specific ideas about how to make that happen. After more than a decade as a club pro, Rinas, a Class A PGA professional, set out on a new path. His goal was pretty simple. He wanted to help make you a better player.

Just about every new club or device on the market promises to make that happen. Golf magazines are filled with tips from expert teachers that are guaranteed to lower your handicap. Makes sense. If people become better golfers, they are more likely to stick with a game that you can play in your 70s and 80s and beyond.

To Rinas, the key to growing the game is access. As a club pro at a private facility, Rinas saw how limited the access was to practice facilities and lessons. Even the members at those clubs had to schedule lessons around a club pro’s busy schedule.

And how about a place to practice at when you’re, say, on your way to work at 6 in the morning. Forget about it. And don’t get the public-course golfer started when it comes to finding a place to practice. And winter was the time of year the golf course was shut down in the Philadelphia region, so you had to shut down your golf game as well.

It’s been about two-and-a-half years since the vision of the 35-year-old Rinas, a native of the golf-rich Rochester, N.Y. area, took shape at the Skramble House of Golf in Horsham.

The place would be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And it’s a whole lot more than an indoor practice facility. It’s a golf club and Rinas, the owner and director of operations, sells memberships and part of the membership fee includes lessons.

There are simulators and miniature golf. And make no mistake about it, this is all about golf. It’s not a restaurant or a bar.

On a day in late February, Rinas is sitting inside his second location, the Skramble House of Golf in the Valley Forge Marketplace Shopping Center in West Norriton, just above King of Prussia. It opened in early January. It’s bigger, 21,000 square feet as opposed to the 8,000 square feet in Horsham, and newer than the Horsham location with 12 simulators to the five he has in Horsham.

But the goal, just as it has always been in Horsham, is the same. Give people who want to play the game access to the tools that can make them better players, that can help them break 100, break 90, break 80, maybe even break 70.

“It’s all about golf and doing everything we can to give access to our members that they can’t find anywhere else,” Rinas said. “And we have everybody coming in here, kids, women, seniors. Our youngest member is 4 and our oldest is 88.”

The Skramble House of Golf also boasts plenty of space to work on your short game and nothing lowers your scores more than improving that area of your game.

“We even have a bunker,” Rinas said. Golf has always had the reputation, fairly or unfairly, of being a little stuffy. At the Skramble House of Golf, though, it’s OK to wear a T-shirt or a sweatshirt or workout attire or even a hoodie.

Put it all together and Rinas got the response from a lot of the underserved members of the golf community, both at Horsham and now in King of Prussia, that he always thought he would. And Rinas has the energy to make it work.

“We have 210 members in Horsham and we already have 270 members here,” Rinas said. “We’re going to cap it at 320 here. The No. 1 thing is we’re always open. We have more people in here from 2 to 6 a.m. than we do from 7 to 11.”

The Philadelphia Section PGA recognized that Rinas might be on to something when it honored him with the Section’s Player Development Award in 2021.

A big part of that award-winning approach is Rinas’ insistence that his members treat the Skramble House of Golf like it is a home.

“I know all my members and when they came in I want them to say hi and when they leave I want them to say bye, hi and bye, just like they would if they were coming into my house,” Rinas said.

You can even leave your golf bag there.

“We have 74 bags stored here right now,” Rinas said. “People just like to leave their bags here.”

The Skramble House of Golf is a place that hosts events as well. You can bring a gang, whether it’s a birthday party or a business meeting, get it catered and you’ve got a party. And how often do you get to go to a party that includes a miniature golf course?

Ultimately, though, it’s about the golf. The simulator was something of a novelty a decade or so ago. But as the technology has evolved, the popularity of simulators has grown. Rinas knew that was coming and that the average clubhouse just didn’t have room to accommodate a whole bunch of simulators, like, say the 12 that the Skramble House of Golf in King of Prussia has.

Rinas had 50 guys coming in to the Skramble House of Golf for a Monday Night league. There’s a women’s league, an invitational event, a Stableford event, a junior tour for the youngsters. All on simulators.

Obviously, winter, when the weather in this part of the world keeps many golfers off the golf course, is prime time for simulators. But they increasingly have become useful all year around, especially for that golfer who wants to work on his or her game at odd hours.

Rinas knows that junior golfers represent the future of the game. When he scheduled a junior clinic eight weeks ago, 100 kids signed up. The largest group among them were youngsters ages 4 to 7. He has a competitive league for players from 13 to 18. Some of the best players in District One and the Philadelphia Catholic League have spent time working on their games at the Skramble House of Golf.

Rinas’ timing for his Skramble House of Golf concept couldn’t have been better. The arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in the spring of 2020 created a golf boom as new players became interested and the game welcomed back some golfers who decided to shake the dust from their sticks.

Rinas acknowledges golf’s COVID boom contributed to some his early success in Horsham. But he still sees the Skramble House of Golf as a need in the golf community that his approach is filling.

“When we opened in Horsham, it was like 60 percent private-course golfers,” Rinas said. “But now it’s about 50 percent public and private at both places.”

The Skramble House of Golf doesn’t work without the dedication and work ethic of a guy like Rinas. But it’s easy when you keep the main goal in focus at all times.

“The only thing we’re trying to do is to make you a better golfer,” Rinas said. “And I know we’re doing that.” TSG

For more information: SKRAMBLEKOP.COM