Power of the Invitation
Introductions to the game start with extending ourselves to others
In August, I attended the CPKC Women in Leadership Summit at Edmonton’s Fairmont Hotel Macdonald, held ahead of the 2026 CPKC Women’s Open.
Craig Kessler, who has been LPGA commissioner for a little over a year, spoke that morning. He covered a lot of ground, and I filled several pages in my notebook. One idea has stayed with me ever since.
Golf, he said, more than anything else, is a game of invitation, and the power of that invitation is unmatched.
Despite years in this industry, I had never heard it put so plainly.
Here is the trouble with that word in our sport, though.
Invitational. Invitation only. By invitation of the membership. For much of golf’s history, “invitation” has been our polite term for a closed door – describing who is coming in and who is not.
That is what made Kessler’s version land. He was using the same word to mean almost precisely the opposite.
Ask almost anyone how they started in golf.
Plenty will point to a school program, a clinic or a tournament on television that made them curious. However, if you keep asking, there is usually a person behind the story. Someone who drove them or signed them up. A father, a grandmother or a neighbour with spare clubs rattling around in the trunk. A friend who said, “Come out with us. You don’t need to be any good. Nobody’s watching.”
I was invited to the Trochu Golf Club on a warm January day by my dad and grandpa. A Chinook had warmed the Alberta prairie. An old club was cut down for me in the garage, and we ventured onto brown, wintered grass that days earlier had been covered in snow. That was my introduction to this great game.
Every one of us is downstream of somebody asking.
We build programs, pricing models, pathways and marketing plans. All of that matters, but much of it rests on a simple moment beyond any strategic plan: one person saying “come along” to another.
We saw that recently at the BC Indigenous Championship, where a junior clinic welcomed almost 60 young people through the efforts of community leaders, I·SPARC, First Tee BC and local partners. The clinic was the part we could see, but every young person had to get there first: a parent said yes, an auntie passed along the information, a community leader called. Somebody decided this opportunity was worth putting in front of a young person and invited them to come.
Without those conversations, there is no clinic. And without the clinic, there is one less reason to have the conversation.
Organizations like ours cannot replace the personal invitation, because its power comes from the trust between the person extending it and the person deciding whether to accept it. What we can do, however, is make that invitation easier to extend, and easier to say yes to.
We can create programs worth inviting somebody to. We can address the cost, equipment, transportation and other barriers that sometimes turn “you should come” into a practical impossibility. We can support those who already make people feel welcome, and when somebody takes the risk of showing up, we can give them a reason to return.
We can generate curiosity, but showing up is harder and often requires someone you trust. That is the quiet magic of the invitation: it happens person by person, when someone notices who is still waiting to be asked. It may never appear in a participation report or be known beyond the two people involved, yet it is how a sport becomes a place where you belong.
Maybe that is the opportunity in Kessler’s choice of words.
Golf has spent a long time attaching invitation to exclusivity. Perhaps we should use it just as deliberately the other way – not as something reserved for those inside, but as something those of us who love this game extend outward.
We will keep building pathways and creating opportunities, but the simplest part does not require a new program. We only need to think of the person who has not been asked yet, and extend the invitation.