Hagley Competitions Calendar 2023
Members,
After running the competitions for a couple of years now, I’ve received a fair bit of feedback from various members as we’ve been moving throughout the year. There were several issues that repeatedly kept coming up and, it was felt that the overall calendar needed looking at to address some of these subjects.
After several conversations, and a fair bit of work, we feel that we have managed to create a calendar for next year that confronts many of the concerns raised.
Some of you may have noticed that next years ClubV1 diary has already been populated with the competitions but I have attached a PDF of the weekend competitions together with this notice for your perusal. There is also a copy of the calendar within the ‘Competitions’ documents folder on Club V1.
There are several competitions that have moved around, some that have been added and some that have been taken out.
The main differences include:
- All the main qualifiers now take place in April allowing new members to take part. By moving the qualifiers to later on in the year (from March to April) we feel this should also give our course more time to recover from the winter period allowing us to play our ‘honours board’ trophies in better conditions.
- This new calendar has opened up several free weekends across the year (8 in total from March through to October). The reason for this is twofold. Extra free weekends across the year will help with rescheduling should it be needed. Also we have many members who do not wish to take part in competitions. Free weekends will allow these members more access to get more value out of their 7 day membership fees.
- Excluding the Winter Alliance, there are now 15 Saturday competitions and 15 Sunday competitions. This will help those who cannot make either day, allowing them to enter a fair number of competitions.
- We’ve attempted to spread out all the ‘more expensive’, charitable competitions and opens so that we’re not asking players to keep paying extra within a more confined period. We feel people are happy to pay extra for a certain competition but when these are placed week after week, it doesn’t seem fair.
- We’ve also attempted to spread out the ‘type’ of competitions across the year. If you look at the PDF, Red = Medal, Blue = Stableford/ qualifier and Green = Team comp, non qualifier. Again, the idea is to mix up the formats to keep the calendar fresh and renewable.
- We’ve altered the John Weston Trophy to a 3 man stableford team competition, all 3 scores to count. This will allow us us to make this competition a qualifier, as I received feedback that we needed more qualifying competitions in the calendar.
- We’ve reintroduced the Hagley 6’s competition, again following feedback from members. The idea behind this competition being a fun, social event. this will take place on a Sunday of a bank holiday weekend.
- Following conversations with Gareth and the professionals, we have integrated the professionals day and the Greenkeepers Trophy. The day will run in much the same manner as 2022 but will now incorporate a ‘Greenkeeper’s revenge’ format making this day a fun social occasion for members and will hopefully be a focal point of the yearly calendar.
- Looking at our open competitions, we have replaced one of our pairs comps with a Texas Scramble Open. We feel there is no need to run two separate pairs opens and also that a Texas Scramble format would be more appealing for attracting visitors to the club.
- The Bill Evitts Texas Scramble has been moved forward in the calendar. The idea being that we can play a Texas Scramble whilst the course is still partly in recovery mode from the Winter period.
Apologies for the longwinded notice but I hope this goes some way to explain the changes that we have made to the calendar, the reasons behind them and also indicates why we have sought to put these alterations into effect.
As always, thanks for your support
Matt Greaves, Comps Chair