PENINSULA — Brandywine Country Club could eventually become part of Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

The Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit group that creates parks and protects land, is in talks with the National Park Service and the property owners about the 215-acre golf course at 5555 Akron-Peninsula Road, said Shanelle Smith, Ohio state director for the trust.

In a prepared statement, Smith called the land "special property" that could be converted "so that the people of Summit County and the millions who visit Cuyahoga Valley National Park can have access to it for generations to come.”

More than 2.4 million people visited the 33,000-acre park in 2016, making it the 11th-most visited national park site that year.

“We are working with the Trust for Public Land to understand opportunities to protect the golf course as open space,” Jennie Vasarhelyi, spokesperson for the National Park Service at Cuyahoga Valley National Park, said in a prepared statement.

According to Beacon Journal records, the owner-operator of Brandywine Country Club, Ryan Yesberger, died by suicide at the country club last year after police said he attacked an officer and took his gun.

Yesberger apparently took over ownership of the golf course from his father, Brett Yesberger, sometime after he died in 2009 at age 47. Brett Yesberger's father, Earl Yesberger, who died in 1988, designed Brandywine in the 1960s, according to his obituaryin the Beacon Journal.

According to Summit County property records, Brandywine Country Club Inc. owns the property. The land includes three buildings — the country club built around 1965, a clubhouse built around 1990 and a two-bedroom, one-bathroom bungalow built around 1990. More than $100,000 is owed on the property in taxes, according to property records.

The phone number for the country club has been disconnected, and its website is no longer active. No trespassing signs are posted on the property. According to Golf Advisor, the course closed this year.

Closing is trend

The golf course at Brandywine Country Club is the latest golf course in the Akron area to close in recent years.

Valley View Golf Course is becoming part of the Summit Metro Parks after it closed in 2015 and was sold to the park district for $4 million in 2016. Cuyahoga Falls is considering a request for a proposed 148-unit townhome development at Sycamore Valley Golf Course.

The Blue Heron Brewery in Montville Township opened in the former Blue Heron Golf Club clubhouse this month after the course closed at the end of the 2011 season, with the course itself becoming the township-owned Austin Badger Park.

The nearby Rustic Hills Country Club in Medina County closed in January after more than 50 years, with the owner citing new banquet venues and restaurants growing in Medina County and the region and demand for golf courses diminishing.

In Portage County, Kent State’s golf course closed at the end of 2016, citing declining revenues and mounting operating losses, and the university is seeking permission to sell it.

According to Urban Land, the magazine of the Urban Land Institute, a network of real estate and land use experts, a golf course development boom began around 1990 and lasted more than a decade.

But since 2006, 1,854 golf courses have closed and only 557 have opened, according to Urban Land, citing numbers from Pellucid Corp., a golf industry analysis and advisory firm. Over that period, the total number of courses in the United States declined nearly 9 percent to 13,577, Urban Land reported in August 2018.

Golf course brokerage Fairway Advisors founder Jeff Davis said roughly 3,500 to 4,000 golf courses were created in the United States in the late 1990s to early 2000s, a time when the number of golfers was already starting to drop in the country.

Davis said many courses were built as amenities to residential projects — built to sell real estate, not because of a need or demand for more courses. Plus, younger generations aren’t as interested in golfing as the older generations, he said.

“It’s a time-intensive and not inexpensive sport,” he said. “There’s a lot of competition for your leisure dollars, too.”

Since 2008 and the start of the Great Recession, Davis said more courses have been closing than opening.

“It’s just a classic oversupply issue,” Davis said.

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

Contact Emily Mills at 330-996-3334, emills@thebeaconjournal.com and @EmilyMills818.