BENNINGTON — The colored golf balls are long gone. Tall, uneven grass now brushes against the ceramic beard of the weathered gnome next to the replica Bennington Battlefield monument on what once was the brightly carpeted putting green.
Katie and Colleen Miclette took over the Sunset Mini Golf property off Route 7A in February 2022 with the immediate plan of changing the property to a full-time dog training facility. Somewhere along the way, they realized it might be possible to keep the mini golf facility, a community favorite since the 1980s, going as well.
That idea was quickly bogeyed by their career plans and capped by a series of sub-par summer weekends in the summer of 2023. Those weekends, filled with a drenching, unending rain or summer humidity and temperatures that soared well into the nineties, made that decision a little easier.
“It was fun that first year,” said Katie, a certified professional dog trainer and behavior consultant. “But that didn’t last much past that first summer.”
What initially attracted the married couple to North Bennington and to purchase an aging mini golf course wasn’t necessarily the mini golf, although that seemed like a fun way to make money on the side.
“The property was big enough, and it was going to let me train here,” Katie said. “We had dogs in the mind the whole time. I was a dog trainer long before I got here. We tried to keep it running for the first two summers, but our goal was not to run mini-golf. It just sort of seemed pleasant to keep it going. We wanted to see how we could go with the community in wanting to keep it open, but it just ended up being too much and interfering with our businesses.
Colleen, the second half of the partner couple, who operates a gravel driveway and dirt operation with her Kubota tractor from the property, remembers that it was raining every weekend last summer. That, and the intense heat, kept families away in droves.
“It just pretty much meant we had all of the overhead costs but we didn’t even get to staff it,” Colleen said. “We were the ones staffing it, so we were here all weekend. It was either raining or extremely disgusting out. We were paying ever-mounting bills for insurance, constant mowing, upkeep of the facilities, purchasing food snacks, and all of our time, few families showing up in the crummy weather. It was a total bust.”
Katie said the first summer was a lot better weather-wise, and, more importantly, they were new, which facilitated excitement for their new venture. It was also the first time the facility was open in several seasons, so it seemed to have a lot more people coming. Some of those people were showing up out of pure nostalgia reasons.
“We had people who came to relive their first date from 30 years ago that first summer,” Katie said. “Another lady came with her grandson when he was two, and he’d just turned 18, sixteen years later. They came and took a picture on Dino.” (Dino, the Flintstone’s dinosaur pet, is a kids’ arcade quarter ride still smiling in all his purple glory under an old tarp in the lean-to.)
When asked if it felt sad to close it down because of the connection people in the community have to its history, both ladies nodded.
“Yeah. I mean, it was never our goal to run a mini golf, but it was something we really did enjoy, interacting like that with the community that first year,” Katie said. “I mean, we laughed, we had a nice time hanging out when we were here, and we had a staff person then, so we weren’t here every weekend, and people knew us as the “mini golf girls. Oh, and we’re in the Vermont edition of Monopoly. That Walmart had. It was sunset mini golf as one of the properties.”
Katie and Colleen, who purchased the entire property, including the main house where they now reside and all the land that encompassed Sunset Playland, including a now-shuttered go-kart track, knew the handwriting was on the wall when they realized it was becoming much more of a money and time black hole minus the fun factor of the first summer.
“It wasn’t that we weren’t having any enjoyment, but it was starting to really interfere with what we had purchased the property for,” Katie said. “I couldn’t train on the days the mowers were coming. And, I mean, it just started to really interfere with my business. That’s what I do. We bought it for that, not the mini golf, but the property. The mini-golf was an extra bonus. We weren’t really sure what we were going to do with it. We still had all the structures and everything. Once we got it cleaned up and put a fair amount of money in to get the greens taken care of, we could open it the first year, and you know, we did it. We did okay with that, but that second year was too hard.”
Katie’s new business, Dog Lover’s Training, offers private canine lessons, group classes, puppy training, and behavior modification. She also works with shelter dogs.
“I mean, any kind of dog training needs,” Katie says. “I love dogs and dog training. I’ve had my business for 13 years, but these last two have actually been at my own facility. I also do public training at places like Tractor Supply, Home Depot, and smaller veterinary facilities in the area.”
Katie told us she has clients from all over Vermont, Eastern New York, and Massachusetts. When asked whether she trains mostly puppies, she says no, that it’s all different, depending on what’s happening.
“Behavior issues tend to be more than puppies,” Katie says. “With puppy classes, we want socialization. That’s more puppy puppies, like this one.” (She points to a rambunctious and beautiful German shepherd puppy who is training in a group lesson.) “These are young dogs, but most people, they’ll go through basic skills, and then they want to get their dogs to where they can take them out in public and hang out with them. My more advanced classes end up being out in public, like I said, Tractor Supply Home Depot. And dogs are learning different manners. They can go out with their people and be well behaved. I certify for the Canine Good Citizen, so people work towards their CGCs. I also do one-on-one training it there is a need or desire. It depends on what you want to do with your dog.”
Katie tells us she hopes to make the transition to a full-time facility on the grounds of the old mini golf soon, including a bigger, fully enclosed indoor training facility instead of using the old mini-golf offices, and transforming the former golf greens into an outdoor, gated training space, to create a relaxed but a safe situation year-round.
When asked what, if anything, they might want to say to the community, Katie said, “I think that we’re sorry that it closed,” Katie said.
“We both have other jobs,” Colleen said. “That’s not really why we bought it. I work full-time somewhere else, and I’m up early. It’s a long day. It might even be weekends away. It might have been more successful if we could have somebody sit here and run it all week, but we bought it because we need the building. We need to train here.”
“It’s just that’s more of what I do,” Katie said. “And neither of us was hoping to be a mini golf mogul. We just wanted to do something good. And, you know, we thought it’d be fun in the first year. It really was fun and nice. We knew that probably couldn’t last.”
If you are interested in any nostalgic bits remaining from the mini golf facility, or if you are interested in finding out more about Dog Lover’s Training, visit www.dogloversdogtraining.com or reach out at either 802-338-1852 or email at [email protected]
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