Golf Balls Wouldn’t Stop Smashing Into A Family’s Home, But Then They Decided Enough Was Enough

The Tenczars — made up of Athina, Erik, and their three kids — had no real reason to suspect that their home was under such threat before they bought it. The place was a new build, but they’d spoken to the developers about the site. At no stage were they alerted to the severity of the problems that would soon take over their lives.

And so they purchased the house and made the move. This was surely an exciting time for the young family, with a long future in their new, idyllic home on the horizon. And in those initial days and weeks of living in the house, everything seemed right. They loved staring out the windows and surveying their surroundings. But then it happened: out of nowhere, a hard, dangerous object crashed into their property.

Yes, the offending object was a golf ball. Now, it should go without saying that these things can cause an awful lot of damage. They’re hard as nails and tend to be hit with tremendous force. Nobody wants one soaring through the air and smashing into a property full of young children. But that’s precisely what happened here — and it was only the beginning.

It quickly became clear that this was going to be in no way a freak occurrence. In truth, the Tenczar home seemed like a magnet for golf balls. Time after time, their property was shaken by the horrendous sound of these things smashing into it. Lots of damage was sustained to the building, not to mention the tremendous stress and mental anguish the situation inflicted upon the family.

The situation was atrocious for the Tenczars. So many golf balls hit their home that they couldn’t keep up. In the end, they didn’t even attempt to fix the damage inflicted by the collisions. Smashed windows were no longer replaced by new panes of glass, but rather with plastic sheets. This was no way to live!

The family was stuck in a terrible bind. They’d spent an awful lot of money on this house, and they weren’t going to be able to sell it very easily. After all, who would want to purchase a property that’s pummeled with golf balls on such a painfully regular basis?

If the Tenczars really wanted to sell the house, it probably would’ve required a degree of dishonesty. Nobody would knowingly spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a place like this, so they’d probably have to avoid informing potential buyers about the reality of the situation. They weren’t prepared to do that.

That meant the Tenczars were stuck with their ill-fated house. And unfortunately, they didn’t have much support. They sought practical solutions to their problems, but nothing was ever really done to alleviate the situation. And having lived in fear for their safety for years, things finally came to a head at the end of 2021.

The family’s unfortunate tale has actually gained quite a bit of traction in recent months. In April 2022 newspaper The Boston Globe ran a story on the Tenczars, where it delved into what they’d all been through. The article made very clear the mental anguish to which they’d been subjected.

The Boston Globe story also set the scene, informing us of exactly how the Tenczars had come to be in this position. It started in April 2017: Athina and Erik had just had a baby, and they were in the market for a new home. Pretty soon, they found it — a four-bed new build, with 3,000 square feet of space. They were immediately enamored.

The couple shelled out $750,000 for the privilege of owning this house, but they thought it was worth it. With all that space and the pretty views from the windows, this really did seem like a dreamy place to raise a family. But as we’ve seen, it wasn’t long before things started to go badly wrong.

The couple had been in their house for roughly a month before the first incident: out of the blue, a golf ball crashed down onto the driveway from the sky above. Erik had been removing his baby from the car at the time, so it’s quite lucky everyone escaped without getting hurt.

Things only got worse from there: more golf balls started landing on the property, with some crashing into the house itself. The seriousness of the ever-deteriorating situation was really brought into focus when the first window was smashed. Another soon followed, then another. Eventually, a window exploded right where the kids used to play inside the house.

This, unfortunately, proved far from the last time the couple’s children were in the line of fire. One day, the family decided to fill up a little paddling pool for the kids to play around in. It should have been the perfect activity — except a golf ball soon splashed into the water. The kids just weren’t safe.

Over the course of four miserable years, the Tenczars told the Boston Globe, almost 700 golf balls had smashed into their home. As previously noted, it had happened so frequently, in fact, that the family even stopped replacing smashed windows. Instead, they just covered them up with sheets of plastic. But it wasn’t just the windows that were destroyed: serious damage had cropped up all over the property.

The hazards of this situation shouldn’t be understated. When a ball smashed through one of the windows, glass would shatter. Shards would be thrown in all directions, damaging the interior. And if these shards ever hit someone, who knows what horrific injuries might result? Meanwhile, when kids played outside in the neighborhood, they were forced to wear cycle helmets at all times.

Athina and Erik described these golf-ball impacts to The Boston Globe. “When it hits, it sounds like a gunshot,” Athina explained. “It’s very scary.” Erik, meanwhile, spoke about how the hail of white missiles had affected them psychologically. He said, “We’re always on edge. It’s been emotionally taxing on us.”

In case it wasn’t clear already, the Tenczar family home was positioned beside a golf course. Now, reading that, you might be less inclined to feel sympathy toward the family. After all, if they knew they were going to be living close to fairways, shouldn’t they have expected some stray balls to come their way? The truth, though, is more complicated than that.

Bob Galvin is the Tenczars’ attorney, and he wrote an email to the website of Golfweek magazine about his clients’ situation. He explained that the couple had, in essence, been misinformed when they bought their house. He said, “Before my clients purchased the home from the builder, according to the builder a ball had broken a window, and the builder was told that it was an isolated issue by the course owner and would not happen again.”

Athina and Erik had expected a certain amount of disruption to result from living beside the golf course. They were pretty sure there’d be some noise, but nothing too bad. After all, there were other people living in the same area. The reality, however, was extremely grim — and nobody had warned them about it. As Athina remarked to the Boston Globe, “Honestly, if you have all these houses on a course, I assumed it was safe.”

Speaking to the paper, Erik conceded that maybe they should have reconsidered the house. He said, “Should we have looked into chances our house would be hit? Probably. I don’t know. We just fell in love with the house. It was our first house.” But, of course, hindsight is 20/20.

The family attorney Galvin is understanding of people who are reluctant to feel too sorry for the Tenczars upon first hearing their story. He believes, though, that they never reasonably could have known quite what they were getting into. He told the Boston Globe, “They bought what they thought was their dream house and it became a nightmare for them. They couldn’t do anything outside during the golf season.”

Galvin also spoke to NBC News about his clients and their struggle. He said, “They thought they were buying golf-course-view property and what they ended up buying was a golf-course-in-play property… [If] it was apparent to anyone that this house was going to be struck as repeatedly as this one was, they would have never bought this property.”

The issue at the heart of this story stemmed from the golf course’s 15th hole. Galvin has argued the website for the course actually seemed to encourage golfers to try a specific shot that would involve firing the ball right past the Tenczar house. That obviously made their home a very dangerous place to be.

The Tenczars say they contacted the golf club several times to try to remedy the situation, but they were often ignored. That’s a claim legal representatives for the club dispute, but what’s clear is the Tenczars eventually felt they needed to do more. Athina recalled, “We started calling the police because there was nothing else we could do.”

Aside from contacting the golf club, though, the cops didn’t have many practical options. The Tenczars then decided to get in touch with an expert to see if they could install a net to help shield their home. This specialist, however, wasn’t optimistic, telling the family the net they’d need would have to be unfeasibly tall if it were to stand any chance of offering protection.

No obvious solution was remotely on the horizon, and the family was feeling desperate. As Erik recalled to the Boston Globe, “So then a year goes by, and another year goes by, and we’re dealing with this every day during the summertime, until we’re just like, ‘What else do we do?’”

With heavy hearts, the family decided it was time to seek legal representation and to go down that messy route. Of this decision, Athina said to the Boston Globe, “We never wanted a lawsuit; nobody wants a lawsuit. We tried to go in civilly and work with them. We got some communication, but then it stopped.”

The lawyer for the golf club has spoken out about the Tenczars’ claim that his clients weren’t communicative. As reported by the Boston Globe, John Flemming said, “It’s not true that the golf course didn’t do anything. A suggestion that we were completely unresponsive, I don’t think is accurate at all.”

The Tenczars initially set out to sue both the golf club and the construction company who’d built the family home. This latter case was dropped, however, as the family and the building firm came to an agreement out of court. That left the golf club, Indian Pond Country Club, as the focus of their legal efforts.

The Tenczars had to testify about what they’d experienced living beside the golf course. As Galvin noted to Golf Week, their experience was a touching one for the judge and jury to hear. He said, “They are a wonderful nice couple that was literally begging the course to help them because only the course could solve the issue by either erecting a barrier at the tee, altering the location of the tee, or altering the hole — all of which they refused to do even though the impact and the safety issue was well known.”

At the end of six days of proceedings, a verdict came back — and it was significant. The jury had sided with the Tenczars, awarding them with damages for all the suffering they’d endured. The sum was immense. In total, the family were set to receive just short of $5 million from the golf course.

That was a massive — perhaps unexpected — amount of money, something even Galvin acknowledged. He thinks, though, it was appropriate. He said to Golf Week, “The amount of mental distress damages is significant in this case and I am not privy to the jury deliberations but my assumption is that they recognized that this young couple was basically unable to safely use their yard, deck, or even sit safely in their own home for 4.5 years.”

Galvin went on, “This was most importantly never about the money: we didn’t sue for $5 million. We didn’t even quantify or ask for any specific figure of mental distress damages; only property damages with the jury. We simply asked a Plymouth County jury who heard the evidence to award them what they felt was fair.”

Obviously, the golf course wasn’t at all happy about this decision. It put in a request to the judge to intervene and to alter the verdict, but it was no good. The judge wouldn’t mess with the jury’s decision, and Galvin seems to think that’s because he heard the same evidence as they did and fundamentally agreed with their conclusions.

The next step for the golf course, then, was to seek an appeal. That process got underway in March 2022, but Galvin is confident it won’t get anywhere. He told Golf Week, “We are optimistic on appeal given the evidence that an appeals court will see it the same way as the jury and then the judge.”

Flemming, the golf course’s legal eagle, takes the opposite view. He told the Boston Globe, “I’m extremely confident that the injunction will be struck down. In my opinion, as a matter of law, the verdict of $3.5 million for alleged emotional distress is against the weight of the evidence.”

Regardless of how that works out, the Tenczars have finally received some respite from their suffering. By the time this case started making headlines, the family home had stopped being pummeled by golf balls. The course had finally made an alteration, meaning the house was no longer in the line of fire. After everything, it had been a simple fix.

As Galvin reflected to Golf Week, “The situation was easily remedied by some quick modifications to the tee [box]… which is all we asked for at the beginning. The course resisted until it was obvious that this obligation could not be avoided any longer... It never should have had to come to this.” As for how the appeal goes, we’ll just have to wait and see.