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It is sometimes said that timing is crucial in the game of golf. Nobody knows that better than England Golf chief executive officer Jeremy Tomlinson.
Tomlinson had barely got his feet under his new desk at England Golf HQ in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, back in early 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic struck and the world was turned upside down.
“I had a couple of months to acclimatise but then the serious mess of the pandemic hit on 23 March and everything changed,” the former vice president and managing director of Acushnet Europe admitted. “It certainly had never entered my head that I’d be sending out a message confirming the closure of every golf club in England – all 1,800 of them – but that’s what I did.”
England Golf’s job then was to advise its member clubs as best it could at a time when nobody had any clear idea of what was likely to happen next.
“The main goal was just to keep things as calm as possible,” he said. “We wanted to try to make communication as clear as possible at a time when there were so many mistakes being made because it was all so new to everybody.”
England Golf has spent the last 14 months battling the effects of a pandemic which has wrought havoc with society, and a legacy likely to remain for years to come. Virtually every member of society has been detrimentally affected one way or another but, as restrictions ease and some semblance of normality returns, it is possible to see golf benefitting from some positives emerging from the turmoil.
“Two things came out of it for me,” Tomlinson said. “One was the way the (all party) Parliamentary Golf Group, the R&A, the PGA, England Golf and the other home unions started working together. There was a galvanisation that occurred. For too long there had been too many agendas in golf in GB&I, but there was a point pretty soon after the pandemic struck when we all seemed to say, ‘You know what, individual agendas don’t matter here, let’s work together for the good of the golfing community.’ ”
“We’re talking, across GB&I, of anything up to 2 million more people playing golf. That’s incredible, but it’s what we’ve seen in the recent research we’ve been working on with the R&A."
Jeremy Tomlinson
That augurs well for the future. So does the other major positive emerging from the pandemic – the huge increase in people taking up the game, many of whom have joined golf clubs.
“We’re talking, across GB&I, of anything up to 2 million more people playing golf,” Tomlinson confirmed. “That’s incredible, but it’s what we’ve seen in the recent research we’ve been working on with the R&A.
“We’ve seen, across the country, that club memberships have also started to fill up. For the last 10 years, maybe more, the biggest negator of golf club membership has been the ‘cheap as chips’ green fees that were available. But, suddenly, during the pandemic, they disappeared and playing rights became much more of an issue.
“The result is we’ve had an incredible influx of new members. That is still to be reflected in our numbers but, within our 1,800 clubs, we’re already officially up about 15,000 and I think that number is actually closer to 30,000-40,000 which, if correct, would be an increase of somewhere around 6 to 8 percent.
“Now, of course, we have to work on how to retain them and to attract even more.”
Plans to achieve that are included in England Golf’s new Course Planner setting out its strategy for the next five years, and which encourages inclusion, diversity, safeguarding and good governance.
“What we want to do is have a strategic direction that people can understand, that makes sense and hopefully that people can take ownership of,” Tomlinson said. “It’s huge for us.
“I’d like to see golf become a much more embracing sport. I don’t mind sharing with you that, being so close to government throughout the last year, it has been disappointing and sad to realise that in many, many quarters golf is looked on as middle-to-old-aged, rich, privileged, white and non-inclusive. And male, of course. Those are horrible words, and I would love to see that perception of golf change.”
That will require change from within, something Tomlinson is acutely aware of.
“Club golfers tend to be very set in their ways,” he said. “When I talk about that, I ask them to take a breath and try to embrace the fact newcomers might want to get something a bit different from a game that has treated them so well. When you talk to people, they get it. But it’s funny, in our sport, people can get very self-centred and self-indulgent, which is a bit of a shame.”
Tomlinson is equally convinced hostility towards England Golf’s new Independent Golfer handicap scheme, to be launched this summer and will allow non-club members to obtain an official handicap, is misguided and will disappear once it is seen not to detrimentally affect club membership.
Golfers as a breed tend to be resistant to change, which may explain why both the new World Handicap System and England Golf’s new plan to offer official handicaps to independent golfers have proved controversial in many quarters.
Tomlinson puts criticism of the WHS predominantly down to fear of the unknown. He expects things to quieten down once golfers understand the system better.
“In November and December, we dealt with over 45,000 e-mails (about WHS),” Tomlinson admitted. “Since we started back, after the latest lockdown, we’ve been getting over 1,500 queries a week. It’s a huge issue but predominantly it just comes from golfers asking, ‘Why is my handicap this, I don’t understand it.’
“What you have to remember is we’re going through the biggest change in handicapping in 100 years. Golfers are just getting used to it, they don’t understand it like the old system and that really grates with some people.
“What we’re going through is a period which is going to last six, nine or 12 months of people trying to get used to it, building up their 20 cards which they will get best eight from, finding out that players who didn’t put in many cards in the past might experience weird handicap changes. That will sort itself out and golfers will end up with more realistic handicaps.”
Tomlinson is equally convinced hostility towards England Golf’s new Independent Golfer handicap scheme, to be launched this summer and will allow non-club members to obtain an official handicap, is misguided and will disappear once it is seen not to detrimentally affect club membership. Evidence from New Zealand and other countries where similar schemes have been launched tends to support that view.
“Speaking candidly with you, I think the criticism of the whole Independent Golfer thing is driven by a faction who are misguided in the premise that the main reason people join a golf club is to get a handicap,” he said. “There are so many reasons why people do it.
“We know that in England there are somewhere between 1.2 and 1.6 million people who play golf but are not members of golf clubs. It’s a huge demographic. We are looking to attract circa 25,000 golfers a year over a five-year period. That’s our initial recruitment plan. We want to do it properly, and we believe the Independent Golfer handicap scheme will help with that.
“Of course, it’s members of golf clubs who pay their affiliation fees to golf clubs. We should prioritise them and we do. But we believe it’s an opportunity for clubs, and I know plenty of other people who do, too.
“We want to do it in a way which creates connectivity between golf clubs and independent members because, at the moment, that connection is not there, certainly not on a national level.
“We want to create a platform, then work with our counties and our clubs to connect them with independent golfers.”
The good news for golf is there are more of them than ever before.
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