Residents teed off about golf balls ‘raining down’ on LWB neighborhood: ‘It’s really quite unbelievable’
- May 24
- 9 min read
Updated: May 25
IT’S RAINING GOLF balls in Parrot Cove, and residents in the scenic Lake Worth Beach neighborhood are teed off at the city for not doing enough to make it stop.
Errant launches from the city’s 18-hole course along the Intracoastal Waterway have been pelting dozens of homes along North Lakeside Drive and North Palmway.
The badly slicing drives have smashed windshields and house windows, dented cars and front doors, splashed into swimming pools and ripped flower beds.
Dealing with occasional intruding balls is a fact of life for anyone living on a golf course. But Parrot Cove residents, even those with homes not on the course, say they feel as if they’re under attack every day.
And to prove it, they have collections of thousands of dimpled missiles retrieved from their yards along with strange but true tales about drives gone rogue.
One ball smashed through the window of a second-story bathroom as a woman sat on the toilet. “Almost a hole-in-one in the toilet, no pun intended,’’ said the woman’s father, Mark Williams, who owns the property on the west side of Lakeside — across the street from the fairway.
One landed on a man as he was sleeping in his bedroom a few years ago. Another crashed a wedding, bouncing a few feet from the happy couple during a marriage ceremony in the backyard of a house on the third fairway.
“We have been bombarded with golf balls since we purchased our house’’ in 2021, said Eduardo Canet, a Lakeside Drive resident who won’t allow his grandchildren to play in his backyard. “We’ve had our fence damaged, numerous roof tiles broken, and multiple dents on our doors. We live in constant fear.’’
No serious injuries have been reported, but close calls are par for the course. Anthony Marotta was struck on the arm as he walked out the front door of his home next door to Williams.
Just the other day, the mailman snagged a ball with his bare hands, underscoring what Parrot Cove residents say is a greater concern: Homeowners aren’t the only ones at risk. So are the joggers, cyclists, walkers with babies and delivery drivers on Lakeside and Palmway — people who might not even know there’s a golf course nearby.
‘’I understand that when you live by a golf course that there is somewhat of a risk assumed,’’ Williams said. “But this is a high frequency of predictability that golf balls are going to rain on you.’’
And these raindrops — rubber cores coated in dimpled plastic nearly 1.7 inches in diameter, often traveling more than 100 miles per hour — are falling on homes as far as two blocks west of the course.
The problem seems to have gotten worse since the pandemic, according to residents who say they have adjusted their daily routines to reduce the risk of being hit.
Herman Moro, whose backyard abuts the third fairway, won’t use his backyard swimming pool until 6 p.m, “when the golfers are finally done,’’ he said, “because you never know when one of these balls may fall on your head. And being in the water is twice as dangerous because if it knocks you out, you might drown.’’
Jill Anderson, who has made a yard decoration from the colorful golf balls that land on her property on the west side of Lakeside, said she can’t go for a walk without wondering what might fall from the sky.
“A lot of times you can hear them hit the ball. It makes a certain sound, and you know it’s coming,’’ she said. “I have to tell you: We look up every time when we take our dogs for a walk.’’
If golfers have yelled “Fore!” after slicing a drive, residents say they’ve never heard it.
“It’s really quite unbelievable,’’ said Per Lorentzen, who brought 500 golf balls in two buckets to a City Commission meeting on May 20.
Those golf balls, a fraction of the “thousands” he has collected from his yard over the past few years, he said, were visual props to help city leaders grasp a problem he and his neighbors have been trying to bring to their attention since at least 2021.
“It's not the occasional errant ball,’’ he said in an email earlier that day to Interim City Manager Jamie Brown. Having “thousands of golf balls year after year raining down on our urban neighborhood … is grossly unreasonable and completely unacceptable.’’
The problem is confined to the third hole, a par-four that runs north to south along the west side of the course, 20 to 25 yards east of the backyards of homes along North Lakeside Drive from Fifth Avenue North to Second Avenue North.
The golf course opened in 1926 but the third hole was redesigned in 1948 with a water hazard — an irrigation pond — that shifted the hole west so it runs alongside the backyards.
More than 70 years later, improved clubs like the Big Bertha and balls designed for distance such as the Titleist Velocity and the Callaway Superfast help golfers hit longer drives.
But the golfers paying $30 to play Lake Worth Beach Golf Club don’t consistently swing their drivers as accurately as Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy.
“Almost every hacker slices the ball. It goes off to the right, and there’s an easterly breeze from the ocean. The harder you hit it, the further into the neighborhood it goes,’’ said Lorentzen, who detailed the problem in a 28-page “safety proposal” that he sent city officials earlier this year.
Some drives have sliced at 45-degree angles, he said, landing on North Palmway, which runs west of and parallel to Lakeside.
“The hole is being played. It is obsolete. It is very dangerous,” Lorentezen told city commissioners May 20. “It must be addressed because thousands of balls — literally thousands of balls — are leaving that tee and going into the neighborhood between the middle of the 200 block and the middle of the 400 block (of Lakeside) and all the way over to Palmway.”
A white sandwich board sign at the tee box reminds golfers to “PLEASE AIM LEFT” with a left-pointing arrow “FOR HOME SAFETY.”
But city officials say they are working with golf director Marty Caifano on permanent solutions, a claim met with skepticism from many frustrated residents.
Options include changing the direction of the tee box and reshaping the fairway so golfers “start out more to the left,” reducing the chance for slicing drives toward the homes on the right, Teanna McKay, the city’s director of Leisure Services, said in an email to residents on May 16.
Caifano has been discussing potential fixes with contractors in recent weeks and the City Commission is expected to consider proposed solutions soon, McKay said.
But residents, weary of dented cars and smashed windows, want a faster fix. They say city officials have been aware of the problem for years but have puttered around with no urgency to make meaningful changes.
For example, in 2021 a large archery target was fastened to a tree to encourage golfers to aim to the left. But when insulted golfers complained, the target was removed.
While campaigning for her 2024 re-election, Mayor Betty Resch met with about 20 Parrot Cove residents, some of whom said they showed her thousands of golf balls collected from their yards. At the time, neighbors say, Resch told them fixing the problem would be a priority.
“It’s still a priority,’’ the mayor said in a May 22 interview. “A new set of eyes, a new administration, realizes this is an important issue to address and we are addressing it.’’
Residents have all but lost patience.
Sitting in his car on the street outside his home on the west side of Lakeside on May 19, Mac Walsh said he saw a golf ball smash into his wife’s new Mercedes SUV, which was parked in front of his car.
“I got out of the car and saw the dimples and the impact mark,’’ he said, describing a dent he says will cost $1,000 to fix. “Thirty seconds later a second ball came screaming over my head and crashed into the side of our neighbor's house.’’
Walsh said he went straight to the golf course pro shop at Seventh Avenue North and vented his frustrations to city workers. McKay, the Leisure Services director, happened to be there when he arrived. Walsh’s neighbor, Lorentzen, showed up a few minutes later.
At the City Commission meeting the next day, Palm Beach County Sheriff’s deputies noticed Lorentzen sitting in the back row at City Hall with his golf balls a few minutes before he shared his concerns with city commissioners during public comments.
Deputies, concerned he might use the golf balls as weapons, ordered him to remove them from the commission chambers.
“Our intention was to pour them on the ground” in front of the dais, said Walsh, who spoke to deputies in the hallway outside.
“They said if a golf ball so much as rolled over and touched someone’s ankle, I would have been arrested for battery’’ — he paused then raised his voice for emphasis — “while we were there having a conversation about an onslaught of golf balls damaging property and threatening citizens and residents on a daily basis. I thought the irony was pretty awesome.’’
Walsh has asked the city to consider other options, including closing the third hole until the problems are corrected and shortening it to a par three so players tee off closer to the hole, eliminating the need for a long, wild drive.
Some residents wonder if it’s time for them to hire a lawyer.
“We have tried to be reasonable but clearly the sense of urgency to resolve this issue is not adequate. I will not continue to” allow the situation to “threaten my family’s safety or accept damage to my property,’’ Walsh said in an email to the city on May 19.
Parrot Cove isn’t the first neighborhood near a golf course to complain about golf balls.
In 2022, a Massachusetts family sued a country club after too many golf balls struck their house. A jury awarded the family nearly $5 million.
A year later, the driving range at West Palm Beach’s newly renovated city course was temporarily shut down after hundreds of balls soared over the netting and onto Forest Hill High School property. The fix to expand the netting cost $300,000.
Those two examples seem tame compared to what ducking-and-covering Parrot Cove residents have endured. They’re worried the day will come when a golf ball injures someone who doesn't live in Parrot Cove but is just passing through.
“On average we get about 300 balls or so in our yard every four months,’’ said Anderson, who lives on the west side of Lakeside.
“The only reason I know this is because I work at a school and I bring the golf balls in and my students for a little project where we count the balls, wash the balls and bag them and donate them.’’
She said she and Williams, her husband, have replaced five or six broken windows since they moved to their house.
“Recently I got a letter from my homeowners insurance telling me they were going to drop me. There was a hairline crack from a golf ball in one of the front windows on the side that I didn't notice,’’ she said.
She replaced the window and kept her insurance. Moro, her neighbor, doesn’t have to worry about broken windows. He installed hurricane proof windows on his house in the 300 block of Lakeside — because of hurricanes, he said, not golf balls.
But, he added with a laugh, “Once in a while I hear a ‘pong’ on the window, and I am always happy to have those high-grade windows.”
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About the author
Joe Capozzi is an award-winning reporter based in Lake Worth Beach. He spent more than 30 years writing for newspapers, mostly at The Palm Beach Post, where he wrote about the opioid scourge, invasive pythons, the birth of the Ballpark of the Palm Beaches and Palm Beach County government. For 15 years, he covered the Miami Marlins baseball team. Joe left The Post in December 2020. View all posts by Joe Capozzi.
