Blue Mountain GC Course Manager Jamie Pender and his team worked wonders to ‘wrangle’ 368 golf bags and over 2,100 loose golf clubs for a photograph which shows the enormous generosity of golfers who have donated their old golf equipment as part of Crown Golf’s ‘Bag Amnesty’ summer 2014 initiative.
At the front, ex-Premier League and international footballer Jason Roberts MBE stands with Cae Menai-Davis and Frank Harrington from The Golf Trust, Otis Roberts from the Jason Roberts Foundation, and Caroline Griffiths and Matthew Lynwood from Crown Golf.
The bags in the photo account for roughly one quarter of the total donated so far, after just four weeks. Since the Amnesty began on June 12th, over 1,400 golf bags and more than 8,000 loose golf clubs had been handed in at Crown Golf clubs as of mid-July 2014.
The Bag Amnesty campaign and the ‘bag mountain’ photograph were created by Crown Golf’s PR agency, Magic Hour Media, to highlight the group’s new Freedom Play flexible membership product.
With the Bag Amnesty campaign running at all 25 Crown Golf clubs until September 28th, the last day of The Ryder Cup, organisers expect over 4,000 golf bags and over 20,000 golf clubs will eventually be donated by generous golfers.
Bag Amnesty – www.freedomplay.co.uk/bagamnesty – is an initiative to liberate some of the UK’s estimated 4 million unwanted golf bags from garages, sheds and lofts, and to redeploy them via The Golf Trust charity to disabled golfers and inner-city golf projects across the UK, and to other projects further afield in countries such as India, the Caribbean and Romania.
Golfers can donate at any one of the 25 Crown Golf clubs this summer (see list on www.crown-golf.co.uk), and will receive in return a voucher giving them £20 off their next Callaway Golf bag when bought at a Crown Golf pro shop.
The Jason Roberts Foundation will also fly one donor plus a friend to the Caribbean island of Grenada this autumn, to see how Bag Amnesty equipment is kick-starting the sport of golf on the island. The prize draw to find the winner will take place immediately after the Amnesty ends.
“This is a brilliant initiative, and the response has already been stunning” said Jason Roberts. “I urge anyone reading this to donate their old bags and clubs this summer, because The Golf Trust will find a good home for every single item, somewhere in the world”.
After this photograph was taken, all of the bags and clubs in the ‘bag mountain’ were shipped to Grenada to be deployed in a variety of golfing projects in schools and parishes across the island.
Bag Amnesty donations can be made at every Crown Golf pro shop with no appointment necessary.
Facebook Page address: https://www.facebook.com/BagAmnesty
Email a photo of your own unwanted bags and clubs to: bag@crown-golf.co.uk
Crown Golf Freedom Play Membership www.freedomplay.co.uk
The Golf Trust www.thegolftrust.com
The Jason Roberts Foundation www.jasonrobertsfoundation.org