Over 1,000 people swung a golf club for the first time during Glendale Golf’s third annual Festival of Golf in August, smashing the group-wide target across six golf centres nationwide.
In this year’s Festival, which took place across a single week of intense activity in mid-August, the six Glendale Golf centres each ran a series of attractions designed to encourage new golfers and their families from the local community to pick up a golf club – and the public responded in unprecedented numbers.
With each venue deploying its PGA golf coaches and SNAG Golf equipment to offer as many free golf lessons as possible during the week, summer 2017 saw Glendale Golf’s biggest Festival yet as regards number of first-time visitors to a golf centre.
A host of fund-raising activities raised over £2,400 for The Golf Foundation during the week, including a 50p donation from Glendale Golf per green fee booked online over the weekend of August 12th – 13th.
And The Golf Foundation also ensured that six lucky participants each walked away with an Etiqus Watch after winning their local Nearest The Pin contest at participating Glendale Golf centres during the Festival.
The group’s most successful summer event yet took place at Castle Point Golf Course in Canvey Island, Essex; Duxbury Park Golf Course in Chorley, Lancashire; Edwalton Golf Centre in Nottingham; Portsmouth Golf Course in Portsmouth; Richmond Park Golf Course in London; and Tilgate Forest Golf Centre in Crawley, West Sussex.
Each golf centre had been targeted to encourage over 100 people to swing a golf club for the very first time – and Duxbury Park led the way by attracting over 300 visitors in a single day to its new Golf & Games Family Park where a family-friendly short golf course, garden games including giant-size Snakes & Ladders and Connect 4 games, and an orienteering trail all drew the crowds. The Duxbury Park team also put golf clubs into the hands of over 100 local children in the town centre at the Chorley Play Day during the summer holidays.
The Edwalton Golf Centre team not only enabled almost 100 children to hit their first-ever golf ball at Nottingham’s ‘Lark In The Park’ event – part of the UK-wide Playday ‘day for play’ which is traditionally held on the first Wednesday in August – but also attracted over 200 visitors to their Festival week later in the month, where a bouncy castle and arts & crafts stalls featured in a family fun day with free golf lessons and rounds on Edwalton’s newly-modelled Family Fun Course.
And dozens of families paid their first visit to Tilgate Forest Golf Centre to try out the newly-created Family Fun Zone on the driving range, which was part-funded by England Golf.
Glendale Golf managing director Tom Brooke hailed this year’s achievements: “This year, for our third event we made sure that everything happened in a single week, rather than running events across the month as in previous years. We also focused much harder this year on attracting pure newcomers to the game, rather than simply aiming for first-time visitors to one of our golf centres.
“And the result was over 1,000 people swinging a golf club for the first time in their lives – at just six golf centres, in a single week. What a week it was! We will have to go some to beat the 2017 Festival of Golf when we run next year’s event. Imagine if every golf club in the UK did something similar.”
“But we are very aware that we need to do much more than just one week of activity every year to attract newcomers and families. This year’s success has given us the impetus to work even harder through the rest of 2017 and into 2018 to make our golf centres genuinely more attractive and accessible to a wider audience, to work more on customer retention and to provide better, higher quality pathways for aspiring golfers of all ages.”
Glendale Golf www.glendalegolf.co.uk