GULLANE, SCOTLAND | Judging by the thousands of women who copy Kate Middleton’s every outfit, it has to be good for golf that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are sending their children – Charlotte, George and Louis – to the Lambrook School in Berkshire, an establishment which boasts a nine-hole golf course. Also worth a mention is that Kate is the royal family member who, upon leaving St. Andrews University, said a heartfelt, “I just wish I’d seized the chance to learn golf.”
Our sport needs all the help it can get at a time when the whole of the U.K. remains football crazy following the England Lionesses’ defeat of Germany at Wembley two Sundays ago. With as many as 87,000 fans packing the stadium, and a record 17.4 million watching on TV, you were left with the feeling that every little girl who followed the fun would have been thinking, “I want to play football!”
Give a girl a football – priced from £8 to £20 (about $9.50-$24) on Amazon – and she can get started. She might find it a bit off-putting that so many of the adverts are about footballs for boys, but all that should change before too long.
From kicking a ball about the garden, a girl can have a kick-about with friends at the local park. Next, she might be lucky enough to attend one of the 63 percent of primary schools in England which offer girls the same opportunities to play football as the boys. Going on from there, as Julie Burchill wrote in the Daily Mail in the wake of the Wembley result, “And, surely now, girls will be scouted from their school football teams, the way boys are.”
“It’s just great to see women’s sport getting more attention all over the world."
Anna Nordqvist
Golf, as everyone knows, isn’t usually that simple.
Yet Anna Nordqvist, the 2021 AIG Women’s Open champion, was not alone among the women at Muirfield last week who thought that the Lionesses’ extraordinary domination of the sporting news did golf more good than harm. “It’s just great to see women’s sport getting more attention all over the world,” she said.
Ben Evans of the U.K.’s Golf Foundation added to the Nordqvist theory. “If you have millions watching women’s football, it has to be good for girls’ golf; it’s another move on the dial.”
Looking to the future, Evans went on to note how the experts talk about “good physical literacy” and “early movement skills” playing a big part in girls sticking with sport in years to come. Inevitably, the current thinking is that where those skills are learnt on the football pitch, there has to be every chance that the moneymaking female footballers of today soon will be following in the footsteps of their opposite numbers in spending their leisure hours on the golf course. (The Alfred Dunhill Links Championship committee, though they are not giving away anything at the moment, could well be making enquiries of the Lionesses to see whether any of them would be up for playing in the next event in late September.)
Far more than football, golf is seen as a game for the middle and upper classes, with those who reach the top usually the offspring of parents who can find the £5,000 (about $6,000) to £10,000 a year it can cost to take children to tournaments around the country and beyond.
Yet club membership fees are by no means all excessive. In Scotland, Graeme Matthew and his wife, Catriona, have a kids’ par-3 course close to their home in North Berwick where their two daughters can play for £10 each per year. All of which is in stark contrast to the £100 per month it costs for them to be members of a local swimming club.
On a slightly different tack, it is not always the well-heeled families who turn out the best golfers. Take Georgia Hall, the current U.K. No. 1, and a golfer whose parents could barely afford for her to play at all. In 2013, when she won the British Women’s Amateur championship at Machynys Peninsula, she and her caddie had to stay in miserable accommodation above a pub and half an hour’s walk from the course.
“It was horrendous,” she said not so long ago. “There was just me and my caddie, and we had two dark, dingy and noisy rooms.” Regarding that daily walk to the golf club, player and caddie never did get a lift from rival competitors: “They just drove straight past.” Small wonder that Hall has developed plenty in the way of killer instinct.
The Golf Foundation cannot keep up with football’s level of accessibility all at once, any more than it can dictate to golf clubs how they mostly need to be more welcoming to the younger fry. However, they are justifiably proud of the GolfSixes League – it involves boys, girls and their parents – which they have introduced to the home countries.
“To compete in a GolfSixes league,” reads the relevant literature, “you need a minimum of six players in your squad (two of them girls) and be able to play over a shortened six-hole course.” Kids love it, seeing the format as something akin to that of a Ryder Cup. At the moment, there are nearly 600 clubs playing in 120 leagues (children do not have to be members to join the programme, nor do they have to pay the £5 per-season cost).
Meanwhile, the Golf Foundation is working with England Golf and Youth Sport Trust to have upwards of 1,000 primary schools offering Golf Way – this involves plastic clubs and balls and is played over a little par-3 in the school grounds – within the next five years.
Parkside Primary in Cheshire is among the latest on the primary-school list. There, the pupils chose golf when they were offered one more sport on their curriculum.
It’s hardly a case of whatever the £4,400-£7,000-per-term Lambrook School can do, they can do better, but it does serve as a reminder that golf could one day be as football in genuinely becoming a game for all.
Top: Young girls are among the inspired fans in Trafalgar Square celebrating the Lionesses' European success.
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