Beginners and Newcomers Welcome at Club Night

We had another discussion at the recent Committee meeting on how to encourage new members and to help beginners. There doesn’t appear to be any one definitive answer. It is clearly something that we will have to build on.

So please be reminded that we do welcome new members and beginners and ask everyone to help them fit in, which in truth I think you already do, however, sometimes good intentions are misconstrued. Maybe sometimes we come across as a bit cliquey when we don’t mean to be.

I know from recently starting playing golf in my 60’s people who can play are a bit intimidating because you think you will never get there. I can honestly say after 5 years of trying to play golf they are probably right! Seriously despite the setbacks by giving it a go you do gradually improve.

So in order to try and help our newcomers we are going to try opening Saturday Club Night to all comers every week, which in practice it pretty much already is but now we will make that our official position and change the words on the Web site to reflect this. In addition on the first Saturday of the month Club Night will start an hour earlier from 4.30pm for new comers and beginners commencing Saturday 7th February. At least one of the Club Coaches or experienced players will be on hand to help out and if then people stay to Club Night they are welcome to.

In addition we are thinking about trying Open Days, more junior coaching and other ways to encourage this however it can’t only be the same people manning it all of the time so we will need help.

Any suggestions on specific things you would like to see please shout them out and we will see what we can do. This isn’t a problem peculiar to us and all Clubs have the same issue so if you see a good idea working elsewhere tell us and we’ll try it. An unrelated example of that is the robot cleaners which we first saw working successfully at High Wycombe and adopted. Credit to them as they helped out explaining how they made it work which helped us implement it.

Apologies for going on. Recruitment and encouragement of beginners is so difficult and we are not helped by being a bit remote without a permanent presence on site so this is hard for us to be successful at.

Regards

Richard

30/01/2026