Scottish Golf chair and acting chief executive Eleanor Cannon called Saturday’s Future of Scottish Golf conference an “incredibly uplifting and positive experience” pointing forward to ways to tackle the game’s slide in participation and club membership.
The governing body hired the Edinburgh International Conference Centre for more than 500 delegates to hear presentations from the Scottish Golf board and to brainstorm ideas at how to counter major issues facing the sport in Scotland.
Stakeholders from area associations, clubs, trusts, the professional game and beyond attended the conference, which was called at short notice to replace a special general meeting of Scottish Golf Limited (SGL) where the ambitious plan drawn up by former chief executive Blane Dodds and the board was due to be voted on.
Instead, with Dodd’s surprise resignation to take up a post at Tennis Scotland and a hostile reception for the SGL plan – which included creating a database of all golf club members and a universal tee booking system for golf in Scotland – resulted in a change of tack.
Much of the six-hour conference was given over to a thorough explanation of the crisis in Scottish Golf that had provoked the SGL’s original plan, but as Cannon told the meeting, the major proposals contained in that document were now “off the table”.
In hindsight, she added, a forum like the conference bringing together so many of golf’s stakeholders was something SGL should have done “two years, a year, six months ago”.
“We’re only two years old,” she said of the organisation formed from the merger of the SGU and SLGA. “Most of the board are new to this, and there has been a lack of communication.
“But this has been an incredibly uplifting and positive experience, even when we are dealing with all the challenges we face for the game that we love.”
To that end, the forum may only be the first of many, with the remit broadened to encompass more stakeholders in the game, but in the meantime the board had been armed with scores of suggestions from the floor at how best to improve the game.
“I think what we’ve created here today is a force for good for Scottish Golf based on our current reality,” she continued. “I’m not suggesting there wasn’t a force for good out there but it was perhaps based on a mixed sense of what the reality was.
“I hope that we are now on the same page. In the coming weeks we’ll continue to consult on all the ideas that have come forward.
“We’ll create new forums around all of these ideas and will find a way to improve communication across golf, in all ways, so that together we can deliver a higher momentum of our common good and purpose.”
The conference, organised at five week’s notice, had been costed by postponing the Scottish Golf Awards due for next March and using part of the budget for that event, she added.
Delegates heard presentations from several prominent members of the SGL board, with Stewart Darling’s treatise detailing the consequences of doing nothing making for a particularly sobering hour and a half.
The CEO of the Vianet Group, a successful tech business, told the audience that Scottish Golf was losing 5000 club members a year, and at that rate of decline subscriptions would have to rise 84 per cent in the next decade just to keep current course maintenance levels.
Darling also highlighted demographic imbalances in Scottish Golf with 100,000 golf club members aged 55 and over and just 21,000 34 and under, while 87 per cent are men and just 13 per cent are women.
“Many clubs are not welcoming to women and children, and that is a fundamental issue,” he said. “We have a huge opportunity but we need to think about the future and how to get more women and families in.”
Those currently successful clubs who thought they could ignore the struggling ones were deluding themselves, he added.
“We are all on the Titanic if we choose not do anything,” he told delegates. “And it doesn’t matter who is sitting next to the hole in the ship if you’re all on the Titanic.”
Board financial director Malcolm Kpedekpo gave an overview of the organisation’s financial health, pointing out that nearly three-quarters of the revenue came from club member affiliation fees and central government, which left the organisation vulnerable to cuts like those in sportscotland’s budget.
Kpedekpo refused to rule out of the more contentious issues in the original SGL plan, to increase the annual affilation from £11.25 to £24, until all new proposals were examined.
“This is the start of a new process and if we think £24 is still the right price when we look at a new strategy it would be wrong not to put it forward,” he said.
Proposals from the floor – ranging from putting junior members in charge of social media to Saturday family events, increasing fees for “nomadic golfers” to more flexible tiering of membership packages – will be collated by the SGL board and studied further.
A new CEO for the organisation could be appointed by the end of January, said Cannon, although most candidates up for detailed interview in the coming weeks had wanted to wait to get feedback from Saturday’s event.