New face at the helm of Tasman golf
Amateur golf in New Zealand is essentially a numbers game.
Clubs across the country are struggling to maintain memberships which in turn impacts on funding for such things as representative teams.
It’s a perennial problem that the Tasman Golf Association’s outgoing executive officer, Trevor Bryant, sees as being critical to the survival of clubs across the board. And the man who’s replacing him, Lynden Murray, agrees.
Decreasing memberships puts pressure on clubs with regard to the appropriate level of levies they impose on their members.
Christchurch-born Murray’s professional background has been primarily in the golf retail sector as a wholesale golf company representative and, more recently, in the supermarket business.
Based at the Greenacres Golf Club, Murray took over the reins from Bryant on Monday and like his predecessor, is adamant that clubs need to be more flexible in their approach to attracting younger players.
‘‘I suppose the biggest challenge involved in all this is the different variables of demographics, size of club, that sort of thing ... and making sure you keep everyone as satisfied as possible,’’ Murray said.
‘‘Obviously the key to it is get- ting more people with a golf club in their hands. That’s one of the things clubs have to come up with too is getting that casual golfer into their club without stretching their budget. I think the likes of us and clubs have to explore how we can be more flexible to suit the needs of everyone because they change all the time.’’
Bryant has been the Tasman association’s executive officer since it was first registered in 2009 as an amalgamation of the Women’s Golf Tasman, the BullerWestland, Nelson and Marlborough associations and the former Tasman association, a men’s body designed principally to select and fund Tasman representative teams to compete at a national level.
He said that fundraising had always been a major struggle.
‘‘Each of the old associations had their own arrangements in place so there was a lot of work had to go in to making it equitable across the board,’’ Bryant said.
‘‘The old associations ran their own systems and charged what they wanted. [West] Coasters had a tradition that guys who were selected for representative teams would contribute to all the trips. Nelson always just levied the clubs and got enough money in to pay for everything.
‘‘Marlborough was about half way in between and the ladies had got to the stage where their levies weren’t quite meeting the costs and they agreed to put them up. There was no way you could have a situation where you went away to a rep fixture and the guys from the Coast had to contribute and the guys from Nelson didn’t. It meant that the levies from a Nelson point of view hardly changed but went up quite a bit in Marlborough and on the Coast, so it took a little while for that to settle down. The clubs got really uptight about it.’’
Nowadays, it’s left to each of the regional committees to arrange their own fundraising.
‘‘The slow decline in membership means that the amount of funding that the association gets every year goes down, so that’s also having an effect in terms of increased costs for [representative] travel and accommodation and van hire,’’ Bryant said.
According to Bryant, NZ Golf is introducing an equalisation system this year which theoretically should even out over a four-year cycle. In the meantime, though, the bigger associations, by their very nature, are better equipped to cope financially.
‘‘The bigger associations that have got a lot of club members, for instance, Canterbury, Auckland, North Harbour and Wellington, their levies tend to be a bit lower than ours and they’ll generate twice as much income. And they’re going to the same amount of events as us.’’