Glendale Golf smashes 2017 Festival target

Over 1,000 people swung a golf club for the first time during Glendale Golf’s third annual Festival of Golf in August, smashing the group-wide target across six golf centres nationwide.

In this year’s Festival, which took place across a single week of intense activity in mid-August, the six Glendale Golf centres each ran a series of attractions designed to encourage new golfers and their families from the local community to pick up a golf club – and the public responded in unprecedented numbers.

With each venue deploying its PGA golf coaches and SNAG Golf equipment to offer as many free golf lessons as possible during the week. A host of fund-raising activities raised over £2,400 for The Golf Foundation during the week, including a 50p donation from Glendale Golf per green fee booked online over the weekend of August 12^th – 13^th.

The group’s most successful summer event yet took place at Castle Point Golf Course in Canvey Island, Essex; Duxbury Park Golf Course in Chorley, Lancashire; Edwalton Golf Centre in Nottingham; Portsmouth Golf Course in Portsmouth; Richmond Park Golf Course in London; and Tilgate Forest Golf Centre in Crawley, West Sussex.

Each golf centre had been targeted to encourage over 100 people to swing a golf club for the very first time – and Duxbury Park led the way by attracting over 300 visitors in a single day to its new Golf & Games Family Park where a family-friendly short golf course, garden games including giant-size Snakes & Ladders and Connect 4 games, and an orienteering trail all drew the crowds. The Duxbury Park team also put golf clubs into the hands of over 100 local children in the town centre at the Chorley Play Day during the summer holidays.

The Edwalton Golf Centre team not only enabled almost 100 children to hit their first-ever golf ball at Nottingham’s Lark In The Park event – part of the UK-wide Playday ‘day for play’ which is traditionally held on the first Wednesday in August – but also attracted over 200 visitors to their Festival week later in the month, where a bouncy castle and arts & crafts stalls featured in a family fun day with free golf lessons and rounds on Edwalton’s newly-modelled Family Fun Course.

Glendale Golf managing director Tom Brooke said: “This year, for our third event we made sure that everything happened in a single week, rather than running events across the month as in previous years. We also focused much harder this year on attracting pure newcomers to the game, rather than simply aiming for first-time visitors to one of our golf centres. And the result was over 1,000 people swinging a golf club for the first time in their lives – at just six golf centres, in a single week. What a week it was! We will have to go some to beat the 2017 Festival of Golf when we run next year’s event. Imagine if every golf club in the UK did something similar.”