Club Charity

In October Edward Richardson met with your Captain, Vice Captain and Competition and Handicap Secretaries from each section. At the meeting Ed explained that it is Get Golfing’s wish to support the coming together of charitable fundraising at each club. Currently, each section raises funds for the Captain’s chosen charity independently of Get Golfing and each of the other sections. The Captain’s have to work tirelessly and without support to raise these funds. While the charities are grateful for the hardwork and endeavours of the respective Captains, the actual sums raised vary considerably year to year.

Ed was proposing that we collectively adopt a different strategy for 2022 where the Club as a whole dedicate its support to one local charity. Get Golfing have hired a designated member of staff who would work with the Captain’s and the chosen charity to promote the following:

• Fundraising within the member and visitors for the local charity.
• Support the charity by creating greater awareness within the club and the local community of the charity’s hardwork.
• Use of club facilities at no cost.

What Get Golfing are bringing to the table is a dedicated member of staff to work with the Club and the charity to ensure they get the most out of the opportunity. In addition to the staff member, the initiative has the full support of the Get Golfing back office with sales and marketing which will further enhance the initiative.

Get Golfing would fund the dedicated member of staff Faydra Mitchell ([email protected]) and train that member in the specialist field of fund raising. Get Golfing would not be charging a levy for these services. Having looked closely at this change in the structure of fundraising at Club level we believe that the following will take place:

By coming together as a club with the support of Faydra,

1. 1. We believe we can raise more funds for the chosen charity without having to constantly chase members for greater contributions.
   2. We believe we can enhance the awareness that the charity’s good work.
   3. We believe that it change the perception of the immediate community and bring us closer together.
   4. We believe we can help improve the performance of the chosen charity through the support of the club and the use of our facilities.

This proposal has been left with the Captains to discuss amongst themselves and with other members of the Club as a principle, and if they are in agreement, then collectively decide on a couple of suitable candidates as our Club Charity. Having drawn up a short list, they would then work with Faydra to assess the suitability of the charity. While we all recognise the good work of charities, we believe that not all charities would be suitable partners that would enable them, and the club, to maximise the opportunity. It is proposed, that once a charity is selected, that the Club will commit all their charitable endeavours to that charity for a fixed period of three years to enable the Club and the charity to properly develop the relationship.

The decision making panel at Warley Park is, David Handley and Carol Mumford and David Skinner along with Faydra and Paul. If you have any suggestions or thoughts on this proposal, may we ask that you come back to Paul so that he can collate and distribute the feedback.

Club News

From Paul Fileman, Golf Manager: What a month we have had starting with the Warley Park Society Masters which we hosted on the 30th September. 

A field of over 80 golfers turned up for an incredible day out on the course starting with a full English to ensure that everybody was fully fuelled and ready to hit the course. It was good to see so many of this year’s society organisers along with a few of our members enjoying the newly designed front nine holes. A massive thank you goes out to Ollie who came down from Mill green to assist and be our beat the Pro for the day out on the 18th, he managed to raise £500 for the Captain’s Charity. On completion everyone enjoyed and amazing meal of a curried chicken kiev, followed by a lemon tart with a prosecco sorbet prepared by our incredible kitchen staff.  

Congratulations to the winners, Liam Dennis and Gavin Wilkins who romped home with a massive combined stableford score of 84 and have won themselves an incredible trip to play at Le Touquet next year. 

Second was Dan Watts and Ricky Paris who came in on countback with 76 points. Third place went to Kev Smith and Dave Belcher with 76 points also on countback. 

Everybody who attended had an incredible day and I for one cannot wait till The Warley Park Society Masters 2022. 

We hosted the Bosh Golf Day for Tom Skinner of The Apprentice fame. 

Over 160 golfers took part including some West Ham Legends including Tony Cotte, John Moncur, Mark Ward, Tony Gale, Kenny Brown, Jimmy Walker and Brian Dear to name but a few. 

Everyone had an amazing day and the nearest the pin winner got to drive his prize away after winning an Audi A3 convertible. 

Our Lady Captain, Liz Brown, was in fine form at Rochford Hundred on Sunday the 3rd of October, winning the Essex Gold Singles KO Competition Final against Taylor Edkins, a formidable opponent from Stockbrook Manor.  

The match went to the 19th hole when a heavy rain shower threatened to delay the game, but Liz battled on to win the hole, the match and the top award in the tournament.  

Well, done Liz, a great achievement all of us here at Warley Park are immensely proud of you! 

Birthday wishes go out to Wayne this month who hit the big 50, I promised that I would not share a certain picture… nor the nickname and I am a man of my word but if you do want to see me with an appropriate bribe, I may be encouraged to share the picture in next month’s newsletter! 

A team represented Warley Park at the Get Golfing Race to Pyrford event over two days on the 14th and 15th of October and all that attended did us proud. A special congratulations go to Delray Bussey who was crowned the winner of the lady’s comp at the Race to Pyrford and as a result has won an incredible trip of a lifetime to play in a Pro-Am in Thailand, well done Delray I cannot begin to say how excited I am for you to have won such an incredible prize. 

Subscriptions. 

Since we took over in June 2020, we honoured covid credits and in 2021 we did not increase subscriptions. The primary goal of Get Golfing is to deliver a quality experience to our members with excellent value for money. In order to operate at a surplus and be able to continue to invest into the Club, we look to supplement the operations with visitor income. As we all know, inflation has started to raise it head and we have been advised that we should expect an increase in operational costs of between 5 and 7.5% due to increased staffing costs, energy, supplier pricing, etc. We are very keen to resist increasing subscriptions, but have to act with an air of caution. We are therefore going to increase subscriptions across all categories except junior members who are free, by between £1.50 and £3.50 per month. This amounts to an increase on a full or five day membership of 3% and 2% respectively. A separate email with a detailed breakdown will follow shortly.

These increases only kick in from April 1^st or when your membership renews thereafter. This means that if you are due to renew between January and March, your subscription will not increase until 2023.

Clubhouse Improvements

The plans to close the clubhouse in January remain to start work on the refurbishment. The exact scope of work to be done has not been finalised, and won’t be until we have the contractors tenders back and have come out of planning. There is a petition of support for the planning in the clubhouse and we would welcome your support. The work includes the following:

• Phase One. A refit of the function suite to include the relocation of the bar, new flooring, lighting, and bi folding doors out toward a newly constructed elevated terrace out toward the 18^th green. New restrooms and a separate fire escape are also included. This will enable Warley Park to offer a far better experience to both members and visitors.
• Phase Two. We propose to increase the size of the old pro shop out toward the car park so the external wall is in line with the current disabled toilet. This will enable us to offer this room for functions, society golfers who wish to eat alone, and meetings.
• Phase Three. Increasing the size of the Golfer Bar to include more seating, an outside bar to the patio, and a galley kitchen so that we can deliver catering when we have events on.

You can see the preliminary plans attached in the pdf’s below:

• Proposed clubhouse elevations
• Proposed clubhouse floor plans

Course News

From Dominic Rodgers, Course Manager: Well, Summer has gone away rather quickly! Whilst the course is holding up very well and the greens are playing nicely, I thought you all might appreciate learning about some of the issues we have to deal with over the last few weeks and going into Autumn. We have had over 60mm of rain in the first week of October, and 40 mm in the last week, with more forecast. This very wet and humid weather has caused us several problems. 

For the record these problems are not special to Warley! Those of you that play elsewhere will have seen all or some of the same issues at other courses. 

Worm casts have suddenly gone crazy on all areas of the golf course. Owing to chemical restrictions there are very few, (that work and are either not incredibly expensive or illegal!), products we can spray to deter worms from casting. Whilst the aeration they provide the sub surface can be seen as beneficial the soil casts they leave on the surfaces are an unsightly pain! We have sprayed the greens and approaches with a new turf conditioner this week which whilst quite expensive is being reported as doing a great job. So fingers crossed? 

You also have probably noticed Crane Fly’s hatching everywhere! Especially on our Greens. Bless them not! These have been hatching out all over the place and once they have, they just fly around looking for places to lay their eggs which become ‘Leatherjackets!’ The damage Leatherjackets do is well documented as is the fact we no longer have legal chemicals we can spray anymore. Until 3 years ago we could spray the whole golf course with a pesticide that worked brilliantly for about £500. Now we have a pesticide from USA that is only allowed to be used only on Greens and tees under an emergency licence. It has to be heavily watered in, (which does not help other issues!), to get the pesticide deep into the soil. And it costs about £1800 just to spray the Greens! 

The above picture shows a disease called ‘Dollar Spot‘, we have areas of this on some fairways and approaches. Dollar Spot occurs when there is additional moisture present on warmer days and the cool nights of spring and autumn. Such conditions have been very prevalent the last 4 weeks. Dollar Spot disease appears as small (dollar size) spots of pale, bleached turf. The spots may be slightly sunken, causing an uneven surface, and can merge to form large areas of affected turf. There are a few fungicides that can help stop it, but it does just recover itself after a while. At approximately £750 per hectare it would cost in excess of £6500 to spray all fairways and approaches we let it recover itself! 

This warm wet weather also encourages the development of Fusarium disease on greens. The best analogy I can give you is it’s like a human getting a cold or virus. Often caused by stress and especially during damp conditions. Ask yourself how many people you know at home or your workplace that are presently suffering now with a cold or virus? To use the human analogy again, strains of viruses are getting increasingly resistant to medicines and anti-biotics. The same applies to Fungicides. In addition, most fungicides that worked have been banned from the UK making our job even harder. Measures we do take to try to prevent Fusarium is to make the grass plants hardier, by use of iron, potassium and silica. Also, we try to keep the surfaces as dry as we can, not easy when we have damp days and clear nights creating heavy dew’s in the mornings. Hopefully, we will get a few hard frosts soon as this normally stops the disease in its development. 

Finally, the other issue we are having now is the deluges of rain coming in large quick quantities. This makes cutting surfaces difficult without leaving either brown water marks or grass clippings. A few inches below ground the clay soil is very dry and so sudden deluges of rain either runs off onto certain low-lying areas or just soaks the top few inches with nowhere to go.  

So… these are some of the issues we must deal with as Green Keepers! We are not moaning about our lot, just really trying to educate everyone that times are changing and making our jobs harder.  

As a golfer it’s good, I believe, to understand these issues and to then appreciate that when things are not always how we want them on the course, you know that we are doing all we can to prevent things, (legally!), though as often said we cannot control the weather. Hopefully, you have found it an interesting read, or I have helped solve your lack of sleep issues! 

Cheers Dom 

Captains’ Update

From Dave Datson, Club Captain:  

President’s Cup 

It was a great honour to play in the President’s Cup. A shotgun start event on Saturday 25th September and one of the great traditions of our wonderful Club, which Get Golfing have been very happy to continue. Our generous President, Gerald, presented prizes after the golf and “rang the bell” in the bar afterwards. Gerald was extremely happy to invite the Ladies and Juniors to participate which produced a full field of over 75 golfers for the event. 

Past Captains Cup 

This event was held on Sunday 26th September, 18 holes of golf and lunch afterwards with our lovely wives. Another great tradition of Warley Park. The winner on the day with a magnificent 42 points was Past Captain Bernard Tilley who in his acceptance speech commented that Warley Park is one of the few local clubs, who are managing to keep these traditional events alive and promote such long lasting friendships. This is due in no small part to the assistance from Get Golfing and especially from our extremely hard working and friendly General Manager Paul Fileman. 

Village Cup 

This was held on Saturday 6th October, a mixed Greensomes event. Lovely to spend the afternoon with our wonderful ladies and I would encourage everyone to enter these different types of events. It’s a great opportunity to mix with other golfers from our wonderful Club. 

Home Seniors Match v Cannonsbrook 

I was privileged to play in this Seniors event on Monday 11th October and delighted to report a resounding victory for Warley Park. We had a smashing lunch afterwards thanks to the efforts of Sarah and her staff in the kitchen and clubhouse. Great fellowship once again! 

Pyrford Lakes 

Several of us from Warley Park were privileged to be invited as guests of Get Golfing to Pyrford Lakes Golf Club near Woking. This is another Club in the GG group of golf clubs and a very tricky test with water coming into play on every hole. It was the season finale event on the Race to Le Touquet (with everyone not being able to go to France) and the hospitality we received was truly exceptional! It was very interesting to talk to people from other Get Golfing Clubs and without exception all praised the efforts of GG, the investment they have made in their Clubs and the improvements as a result. I can only imagine how good this event will be if it is indeed able to be held in France next year and I would encourage everyone to enter the Race to Le Touquet events. The investment in Warley Park already made by GG on the front 9 is apparent for all to see and the improved drainage as a result is clearly evident after all this recent rain. When such improvements are made there must be some short-term disruption, but it is clear to me from the two days I spent at Pyrford Lakes that GG are in this for the long haul and I truly believe the future for Warley Park under their ownership is bright! The only criticism I can have now is that I appear to have drunk the bar out of Zinfandel Rose wine, so if you see me in the Clubhouse on bended knee you know what I am begging for! 

Ladies  

From Liz Brown, Ladies’ Captain: 

I would like to extend a massive congratulations to Delray Bussey for winning the ladies competition of The Race to Le Touquet, which this year was held at Pyford Lakes due to COVID. A fantastic achievement and a real incentive to us all to take part as she wins a trip to Thailand to play in a Pro- Am. 

We had a marvellous Autumn Meeting, 27 holes and a lovely meal in the evening. The weather forecast was horrendous, but the sun shines on the righteous and there was hardly a drop of rain!  

The Autumn Meeting is also when our main presentation evening and a winner’s photo is attached. We had a great turn out; 47 ladies playing and more came to the evening meal. 

Congratulations to Lucy Howells for winning the ladies singles this summer and well done to Lisa Chapman for a very hard-fought battle in coming second. Congratulations also to Marilyn and Jan Stewart for winning the ladies pairs and commiserations to Brenda and Selma for coming second. 

The Ladies and seniors went extremely well on 22nd September. We all enjoyed the Chapman format, The weather was superb and it was lovely to all be sitting together upstairs for a meal afterwards.  

All sections were invited to the President’s shotgun on 25th September. It was an early start of 7.30am, but the course was in lovely condition, and it was a lovely calm day in every way. Thanks to Gerald for all the prizes and buying us all a drink. 

Seniors  

From Steve Abbott, Seniors’ Captain:  

 I am delighted to report that Dave Skinner will be my Vice-Captain for the remainder of 2021, and next year’s Senior’s Captain. I am very confident he will be an outstanding captain and continuing the ethos of the Section of fun, social golf with a healthy element of competition. 

We played our last match of the season at home to Canons Brook and ran out comfortable winners, 7 – 1. That gave us a clean sweep of 9 wins out of 9 at home and an overall record of 10 wins, 2 draws and 6 losses. 

We have our AGM on Monday 29th November after our fun Christmas competition, 3 clubs and a putter, and on the 13th December our Christmas lunch. I hope as many Seniors as possible will attend both events. 

Proshop News

From Nicholas Darby, Golf Retail Sales & Operations Manager: The Proshop yet again has three fantastic offers for you this month! We’ll beat all major retailers on price!

Just a quick reminder, the Mumba Charity Buy Back scheme ends on November 30th, so make sure to get any more old logo’d gear in for £10 off your new club apparel.

Pro News

From Russell Killington, PGA Professional: Hi all, 

This month I will be offering a 20% discount for members only when you book a 30-minute lesson with myself.  

The lesson must be taken in November and are only valid Monday to Friday.  

Please advise of offer when you book directly with myself on 07919186499 or you can book online under “November offer”.  

Happy golfing! 

Russell 

From Wayne Selley, PGA Professional: Here are my FREE lessons for MONTH: 

Hi everyone, hope you are all well and enjoying your golf I can’t believe how lucky I feel to have managed to get away to Portugal for a few days golf and some light refreshments! If you are thinking of getting away for some winter sun & golf don’t be put off by Covid rigmarole if you have your paperwork in place, it was pretty straight forward at the airport and passport control. 

Unfortunately, the shorter days and colder weather are just around the corner, and I see quite a few golfers put their clubs away for the winter months. But, playing golf in the winter months can be most enjoyable with quieter courses and fabulous deals can make it feel you’ve hit the jackpot. 

What’s more, if you want to improve your game, giving up completely during winter is not the way to go about it. To ensure you hit the ground running when the new season starts here are a few ways you can keep tour game up to scratch when playing golf in winter 

It might sound obvious but keeping up the momentum is vital at this time of year, and apart from anything else you will improve your skill by testing yourself when playing conditions are at their most trying. 

You’ll learn to perfect a wide range of shots when you’re braving the elements, whether it’s the low punch into the January wind or the runner that scampers across a frozen fairway to find the green. 

Make sure you have the right winter clothes. Winter gloves are essential to keep your hands dry and warm in the winter months and don’t forget those hand warmers in your pockets. Efficient base layers are also essential in the winter, wearing layers upon layers is likely to limit your movement and particularly your golf swing. At the same time, you don’t want to allow your body to stiffen up in the cold that is why a thin base layer is the way forward. 

Don’t forget to check out our Get Golfing PROSHOP online for all our latest equipment and best prices. 

Take lessons 

The off season is the perfect time to make changes to your game with the darker evenings on their way there is no excuse not to get down the range and put the practice in. 

Winter lesson packages are available for all levels of golfer please phone on 07813822842 or 01277 224891 for more information  

Community Outreach

The team this month have been focusing on working with our 8 sites to adapt the Club’s charitable role within their communities.

As you’ve read, Ed our CEO would like all sections of the club to work together to support one local charity for the next three years and really embed them into our sites with awareness, fundraising and use of our amazing environments.

The aim will be to have one Group charity across all Get Golfing and then one local charity at each site that can receive great support over a sustained period of time. This should maximise fundraising and allow charities to plan and budget more effectively over a 3-year period.

We also hope that with all sections of the club working together it will integrate sections, create great social interactions, and create an inclusive and exciting program of social and fundraising events.

Captains and vice captains are currently in discussion to select the Club’s local charity and we aim to announce group and local charity partners with a January launch. We are supporting this process and will have designated resources to help sites make a real difference to the local charity of their choice.

The team are also currently

• Selecting our partner primary and special schools for 2022 that will receive an amazing package of support over the next 3 years.
• Organising our TAP/SEN program cohorts for 2022.
• Setting up our This Girl Can Get Golfing calendar.
• Developing partnerships with a wide variety of clubs and providers to broaden activities offered on our sites.

We look forward to supporting your club and if you have any ideas or links to local groups who could benefit from our support please get in touch with the team.

[email protected]

[email protected]  (East)

[email protected]  (West)