by Doug Miller
From playing professionally, to paramotoring, to baking pizza, to golf course ownership – Levi Venn doesn’t hold back. The game of golf has taken Venn on an adventure with an itinerary that matches his personality: all over the place, in the best of ways.
It’s taken the former prep golfer from Washington’s Auburn-Riverview High School to the Canadian Tour, where he tried his best to slug it out alongside current PGA Tour stalwarts Tony Finau and Joel Dahmen.
It’s taken him to the air, where the sense of competition and fearlessness he finds on the links helped prepare him for his high-flying hobby of paramotoring (powered paragliding).
It’s taken him to Florence, Italy, where he spent 13 days immersed in an intensive course to learn how to cook authentic wood-fired pizza.
And it’s taken him to Sage Hills Golf & RV Resort in Washington’s rural Columbia Basin, where in 2023 he went all-in as the course owner and immediately began working toward improving the facility and delighting its tight-knit community of customers and families.
“I don’t sit still,” says Venn, 43. “In all honesty, I don’t really plan what I do. I just start doing it and finding a way to make things happen.”
Venn made something happen in golf after high school, playing at Central Arizona College and California State University, San Bernardino. While in the midst of honing his game on the course, he began a career at Boeing.
After two years, he decided to shun the corporate life and worked with a friend on building a construction excavation business in Western Washington. He kept lowering his scores on the course during his off hours, but by the time he was good enough to tee it on the Dakotas Tour and Canadian Tour, he was already approaching 30 years old.
“I didn’t want to regret not playing pro, so I gave it a shot,” Venn says. “I tried to, anyway. It was me at 30 playing against guys in their early 20s. And a lot of those guys had family money or sponsors, and I’m paying out of my own pocket.
“You come to the point where you decide that owning a house is pretty nice compared to going hotel to hotel.”
Back in Washington, Venn moved to Yakima to escape an increasingly crowded Seattle metropolitan area. He continued to play golf with friends, including Chase Looker, one of four brothers in the asphalt restoration business with whom Venn had worked on excavation jobs throughout the years.
Venn knew that Looker’s family had owned Sage Hills in Warden, Wash., for 27 years, and he had heard about its sneaky-tough layout and slick, true greens. What he didn’t know was that the Lookers were looking to sell the property.
Well, he didn’t know it until Chase informed him, repeatedly, with a barrage of phone calls and texts inquiring and then demanding that Venn buy it.
“It mostly started as a joke when I started pushing it on Levi,” Looker says. “But I knew he was a stick. He can really play. And I told him stuff like, ‘You really have to get over and buy that golf course. It’s God’s country over there.’”
The idea grew wings when Levi went over and fell in love with the place. Next thing you know, it wasn’t a joke anymore.
Levi took to his new commitment with typical gusto. He embarked on a full clubhouse remodel. He decided quickly that he wanted to upgrade the course’s restaurant, The Grill, by installing a new kitchen and adding pizza in a wood-fired oven. He built the oven himself and then flew with one of the cooks to Tuscany to learn pizza from the best in the world. He has been fortunate to work alongside Madison Azevedo, whom he says has done exemplary work managing Sage Hills’ restaurant and pro shop.
He put in a new driving range, improved course irrigation, fixed areas that needed repair, and has emphasized stay-and-play packages, with the RV park accounting for a large part of the revenue. He says golf rounds are up between 300 and 600 percent and yearly memberships are up nearly 400 percent. He also gives back to the game he loves. Venn allows all high school golfers and juniors under the age of 16 to play for free.
“Junior golf is a huge part of who I am and what I want this golf course to be,” Venn says.
Visit Sage Hills and you just might see Venn. If he’s not helping out in the pro shop or milling about the fairways, he might be up in the air, flying with his paramotor from Sage Hills to the Moses Lake sand dunes and back.
“I just love building things and being part of a community,” Levi says. “I think I always will.”
Doug Miller is a sportswriter based in the Seattle area. He was the golf writer for the Oakland Tribune before a stint as a senior writer for MLB.com.