There are weeks in this business where you put your head down and grind through it barely lifting your eyes long enough to notice what you have actually built and then there are weeks like this one, which force you to stop and look around and take proper stock of it all.
We were invited to The BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth for the Golf Foundation's annual awards ceremony. What struck me before any of the awards were handed out was the room was full of people who give their time to this game for nothing, volunteers who run junior sections at small clubs, coaches who turn up on a wet evening because eleven kids are waiting for them, people who have spent decades making golf accessible to children who would otherwise never have picked up a club. When you listen to the stories of what the game has done for children up and down the country, the confidence it has given them, the friendships and the structure and the sense of belonging and it reminds you there is a much simpler thing happening on the range and on the first tee.
Standing up there to collect it on behalf of the Link Golf UK team was one of the proudest moments of the last seven years, because it was not an award for me or for Joe or for any one person, it was recognition for something that has been happening across all of our venues, week in and week out, without much fuss. This year over 3,500 children have taken part in free of charge golf coaching sessions across our group. None of that happens without our teams on the ground, the coaches and the pros and the managers who make space for it in an already full diary.
It was a real pleasure to meet Nick Dougherty who is the President of the Golf Foundation. I think he is becoming one of the genuine faces of golf in this country, which is not an easy transition to make. Plenty of players finish a successful playing career and drift into punditry and never quite find a voice, but Nick has gone from competing at the highest level to building something completely different and doing it with real warmth and real credibility and you can tell when you speak to him that the junior side of the game matters to him beyond the job title. Someone with that platform putting his name and his energy behind grassroots golf carries enormous weight and the Foundation is fortunate to have him.
After the ceremony we were taken round the clubhouse, which was a treat in itself. The old trophies, the photographs of past champions going back through the Volvo World Match Play and into the modern BMW PGA era, the clubs donated by winners sitting there in cases, all of it tells the story of how Wentworth became Wentworth. You get a sense of the layers of history in a place like that and the ambition to turn a piece of Surrey heathland into one of the most recognisable venues in world golf. We have so many ideas from visiting Wentworth that we’re excited to implement in our own members clubs.
We were then lucky enough to get out onto the course for the pro-am, where our friend Ross was playing alongside Tyrrell Hatton, so we walked six holes with his group in what turned out to be a remarkable day. Rory McIlroy shot 12 under par 60, which was the sort of scoring that has people running between holes to catch a glimpse and the atmosphere around the place was superb.
What comes next is where it gets interesting for us. We are adding more PGA coaches across our existing portfolio, because the demand is there and the sessions fill as fast as we can put them on and as we move into the private members' club sector with Link Club we will be engaging more and more PGA professionals to deliver coaching across those venues too. We are working closely with the Golf Foundation and with England Golf to get into local schools, to engage with local charities and community groups and to go and find the kids who would never think to walk through the gates of a golf club. With our footprint and our team we think we can have a huge impact particularly with the younger generation.
Next week is back to reality with a busy run of board meetings as we work towards our first member vote to bring our first private club into the group, which is a significant moment for us and one we have been building towards for a long time. Before we get stuck into that though, it felt worth writing this down, because you do not get many weeks like the one we have just had and it is sometimes worth celebrating the wins along the way rather than immediately looking for the next hill to climb.