GolfBoards: what a golf board is, how it rides and where to ride one

What a GolfBoard is

A GolfBoard is a four-wheel electric board you ride standing up, with your bag mounted on a rack behind you. The company that made them launched in 2014 with backing from the surfer Laird Hamilton, and the pitch was in the tagline: surf the earth. The riding position is closer to a snowboard than to anything else on a golf course, and the steering is done by leaning and by a handle at waist height rather than by a wheel.

People reach for other names — a golf hoverboard, a golf skateboard, mountain boards with a bag rack — and none is quite right. There is no hover involved and it is not a skateboard; the closest honest description is a wide, low, four-wheel-drive electric platform built to carry one golfer and one bag across turf. The specification that matters is modest. Top speed is capped around ten miles an hour, roughly the same as a power cart, and a charged battery covers thirty-six holes. Four-wheel drive lets it climb wet grass and slopes that would spin a two-wheel scooter. One rider per board, which is the main practical difference from a cart — a foursome takes four boards, and nobody sits next to anybody.

How riding one differs from a cart

The obvious difference is that you stand. The less obvious one is pace. A group on golf boards generally moves faster than the same group in carts, because each player rides directly to their own ball instead of two players sharing a route and taking turns. Courses that trialled them reported rounds finishing measurably quicker.

The trade-offs are real. You carry no cooler, no second bag and no passenger. Balance takes about three holes to acquire and is genuinely awkward before that, particularly downhill. Wet conditions demand more respect on a board than in a cart. And the boards are more expensive per unit than carts, which is the reason most clubs that bought them bought four or six rather than a fleet.

Golf boards in British Columbia

Uptake in Canada was always thin, and thinner in British Columbia than in the warmer parts of the United States where the format took hold. Boards need a course willing to buy a small fleet, insure it, train staff on it and accept that a proportion of golfers will decline to try. In a short season that is a hard business case, which is why the machines have tended to appear at a handful of courses for a few years and then quietly disappear.

Hyde Mountain was one of the British Columbia courses that took them on, and kept a dedicated page about them on its own website for years. That is a slightly surprising choice for a routing with this much elevation change — a hillside course is the hardest possible advertisement for a machine some players find unstable. It is also, arguably, the best one: the four-wheel drive is doing visible work on ground where it matters, and the descent on the fourth is a genuinely memorable thing to ride.

Whether boards are currently available here is a question for the operator. The course changed hands and now runs as Mara Hills Golf Resort under GolfNorth; equipment fleets are one of the first things a new operator reviews. The tee times page covers how to reach the pro shop.

Riding one for the first time

The advice that comes back consistently from courses that ran them is to spend five minutes on flat ground before the first tee. Balance is the whole skill and it arrives quickly. Beyond that: keep your knees soft rather than locked, look where you are going rather than at the board, take downhills at a walking pace until you trust it, and stop before you reach your ball rather than at it.

Most courses that offer boards restrict them to players over sixteen or eighteen, require a short briefing before you ride, and keep them off the course entirely when the ground is saturated. Expect the rental to cost more than a cart.

Questions about golf boards

What is a GolfBoard?

A single-rider, four-wheel electric board that you ride standing up with your bag mounted behind you. It was launched in 2014, is capped at around ten miles an hour, and covers about thirty-six holes on a charge.

Is a golf board hard to ride?

Not hard, but not immediate. Most riders describe the first two or three holes as awkward and everything after that as straightforward. Downhill sections are where new riders are most likely to over-correct, which matters more on a hillside course than on flat ground.

Are golf boards faster than carts?

Top speed is about the same. Rounds tend to be quicker anyway, because each player rides straight to their own ball rather than sharing a route with a partner.

Can you still rent a golf board at Hyde Mountain?

The course ran them and promoted them on its own site for several years. Since it changed operators and became Mara Hills Golf Resort, current availability is worth confirming directly with the pro shop before you count on it.

Do golf boards damage the course?

They are lighter than a loaded power cart and spread that weight over four driven wheels, so turf impact is generally reported as lower. Most courses that allow them still pull them off the grass in saturated conditions, as they would with carts.