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oronavirus brought huge upheaval for everyone and Karin Sharp was no exception. Scottish Golf’s Chief Operating Officer found herself leading the governing body when Andrew McKinlay stepped down as Chief Executive in April 2020. She steered the sport through the first lockdown and was instrumental as golf stayed open in Scotland when later restrictions closed it in every other part of the UK. Karin’s first year at the helm has also seen the development of OpenPlay, the first independent golfer scheme to be launched, and a revamp of both the nation’s performance and junior programmes. We caught up with her to look back over a tumultuous first 15 months in charge… You took on leading Scottish Golf through one of the most challenging periods any of us have ever witnessed. Clearly you had a lot of experience within Scottish Golf but how did you get through it? It has been a challenging year across the board within Scottish Golf. We had to make a lot of big decisions at a time of significant uncertainty and many of the early challenges we had to face included furloughing more than half of the staff team and still managing to provide a service to the golf clubs with a much smaller team operating. But, equally, in the very early days it was about providing strong representation for the sport with government and, in the first instance, to say ‘let’s try and get things back open again’. As Chief Operating Officer,
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how do you deal with that? When you took on Andrew’s role, clubs were shut, staff were furloughed, people were working remotely. And you’re still trying to coordinate the sport and get it ready for a restart… There was strong communication across the team, particularly with those who were continuing to work within the business and who, in most cases, were taking on expanded roles and having to do an element of cover outwith their usual area of expertise and authority. Whilst the team were all fairly established within the organisation there were many who hadn’t worked cross departmentally much before so strong and regular communication across the team, keeping everybody tight and ensuring we had a high awareness of workloads and there was support for each other. If one person was asked to pick up certain areas or particular tasks, and if the volume was starting to ramp up, we had somebody else waiting in the wings that could have their back - because we were having that strong level of conversation and ensuring that, across the board, we were being supportive, rolling the sleeves up and getting on with it as a strong unit that did what it took to service our membership through a challenging time. It was also really important to keep the team that were furloughed in contact, up to date and up to speed with what was going on to keep them engaged and ready for coming back to work. And you’re doing that against a backdrop of clubs, areas and counties looking specifically to
you for advice as a governing body. You’d also had to undertake some bridge building at the start – particularly in terms of communicating to clubs how you wanted to take Scottish Golf forward. I’m not being controversial in saying there had perhaps been a disconnect in the past… One of my early aims was to ensure there was regular and very transparent communication with the clubs, the areas and the counties, and to ensure there was as much information and updates as we had available which could be shared with them on a regular basis. We kept them as appraised as we could against a rapidly changing environment week to week. We tried to use the different platforms that everybody has become so accustomed to in the last 15 months – Zoom, Teams, other video platforms to engage with Clubs, Areas and Counties and I think that really did help that relationship building piece. That trust and rapport that was built across those groups has stood us in good stead moving forward. One of the biggest plaudits Scottish Golf received was being the only country in the UK to keep playing the sport through the lockdowns this winter. How did you manage that? We were very fortunate from the outset that - back in late March and early April [2020] - we started a lot of regular and early dialogue with the Scottish Government, through sportscotland and Active Scotland colleagues. From the early conversations we were positioning the health and mental wellbeing benefits of the game, particularly focusing on it as informal exercise undertaken
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