North Hills Country Club

Member sponsored, and what that means on the phone

The wording on the club's events page is member and member sponsored events. There is no ambiguity in it and no second reading available. A couple with no relationship to a North Hills member cannot hold a wedding here, and no amount of budget substitutes for the sponsor.

Sponsorship arrangements differ from club to club. Some want the member's name on the contract, some want the member present on the day, some treat a member's immediate family as covered without further paperwork. North Hills does not publish which version it uses, so do not assume the shape of it. Ask the obligations plainly: whose name goes on the agreement, whose card holds the date, whether the member has to attend, and whether being a member's child counts.

If a parent, an aunt or a colleague belongs, this becomes a short conversation and a good one. If nobody in either family belongs, the club's own page tells you where it is pointing you instead, which is the membership director, and joining a club in order to hold a wedding is a different financial decision entirely.

Robert Trent Jones Sr. is the one credential the club prints

The club states that its championship golf course was designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr. That is the single piece of history on the site. No founding year appears anywhere. No clubhouse architect, no account of how the land became a club, no course yardage, no record of a rebuild. The design credit is the beginning and the end of what North Hills puts on the record about itself.

For a wedding, the course matters in a plainer way than it does for a golfer. It is the view out of whatever room you are given, and it is where the photographs happen late in the afternoon.

Since the club publishes no room names, no floor plan and no image of a set table, a site visit does more work here than at almost any other venue in this directory. Go in person and leave with room names and numbers written down.

A page with no numbers on it

We looked for pricing on the club's site and found none. No per person rate, no package tiers, no site fee, no food and beverage minimum, no guest minimum, no service charge, no maitre d' or bridal attendant fee, no tax handling.

We looked for capacity and found a sentence saying the club can accommodate any size group, with no number attached. For a wedding of 220 that sentence is worthless. For a wedding of 60 it is equally worthless, because the risk at the small end is a minimum nobody has told you about.

We also checked the club's listings on The Knot and WeddingWire. Neither adds a figure. That is unusual. Most Nassau clubs leak at least a starting price into a marketplace even when they publish nothing themselves. North Hills does not, which is what you would expect from a club that is not trying to attract outside business in the first place.

Two websites, one of them out of date

The live site is the club's own domain. There is also an older events page still sitting on a clubmsites address under a north hills path, left over from a previous website build. It is stale and it is not the club's current page. If a search result drops you there, back out and start again from the club's own domain.

This matters more than it sounds. Stale club microsites keep old menus, old contact names and occasionally old prices alive for years, and a couple who plans around one arrives at a meeting with numbers the club stopped honouring long ago.

The current events page names Colleen Harrison as events manager, with a direct extension on the club's main number and a club email address. The club also states that parties run year round, which is one of the few operational facts it commits to in writing.

Who to call and what to ask first

Start with the sponsorship question and do not move past it. If the answer is that you need a member and you do not have one, the rest of the conversation costs both sides time.

If you do have a sponsor, the second call is where the real work sits, because nothing is published. Get the room name and its seated capacity. Get the per person rate for your month and your day of the week. Get the service charge percentage and whether tax sits on top of it. Get the minimum, in guests or in dollars, whichever way the club counts it. Get the hours in the package and the price of an extra one.

Then get all of it in writing. At a club that publishes nothing, the proposal document is the only version of the truth that exists, and comparing two clubs from memory of two phone calls is how couples end up surprised in month eleven.

One practical note on timing. Member sponsored clubs often release dates on a different calendar from commercial halls, and sometimes only once the member has confirmed. Ask when your date can actually be held, and what holds it.