The Golf Club Manager: March 2020

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My success story...

NEIL RAMSAY

Sponsors of My Success Story

How do you build a junior team without a junior section? Ripon City general manager Neil Ramsay wrestled with that conundrum, but finding the answer has breathed new life into the club

P

eter Hixon had a bright idea. He wanted to bring new blood into Ripon City and put together a team of youngsters to take on the rest of the Harrogate & District Union.

But there was a problem.

The club didn’t have a junior section.

“It was slightly ambitious,” said club manager Neil Ramsay of his and Hixon’s Eureka moment 18 months ago.

“The position of junior organiser is usually headed up by a parent of a player and they do their term, the player goes off to university or whatever, and suddenly it disappears.

“Historically, the club had some good juniors but, suddenly, there’s an abyss.”

Hixon helped formed a committee, and there was nothing unusual about that, but where the duo’s plans differed from the norm was that Ramsay involved not only the professional team but the rest of the club office as well.

So whenever a junior organiser stepped down in the future, there was always going to be someone to ensure the newly revived section didn’t fall by the wayside

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once again.

Ramsay explained:“Peter puts in a lot of time and, ultimately, will give it up and someone else will come in.

“But at least if we’ve got the consistency from the office, it’s always going to have legs.

“We are leaving a world of fabulous volunteers. Volunteers have built golf clubs, but do those people exist any more?

“So we have to have more paid people within clubs to do the job.”

From nothing, Hixon and Ramsay brought together 16 juniors.

The team was inclusive, with players like Austin Ramsay, who suffers from a disability that causes pain and fatigue in his legs, becoming an integral part.

In a league of 10, Ripon City’s debut campaign among the Harrogate elite brought a midtable finish.

“The driving force in every golf club... is the senior section. People are retiring and living longer but...they are going to die”

They even won a couple of fixtures to boot.

Most impressively, at barely a month’s notice, the club also staged a Junior Open and welcomed a field of 28 players.

They want many more to come this year.

What Ramsay hopes their success will eventually do is shift the emphasis towards bringing more youngsters, the notoriously difficult to reach 20 to 30 age category, along with families into Ripon, and he insisted the members are right behind the initiative.

“The biggest driving force in every golf club, every manager I ever speak to, is the senior section,” he said.

“People are retiring and living

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26/02/2020 14:18