Swan glides on at GCA

Golf course architect Howard Swan was unanimously re-elected chairman of the Golf Consultants Association (GCA) at its recent annual general meeting. Swan has been GCA chairman since 2013 and will lead the association for a further two years. He will be aided by an executive that continues to comprise business advisor John Ashworth, of John Ashworth Associates, Jon Barker of the Adderley Barker clubhouse design consultancy, Luis Desouza, founder and CEO of the NFS Technology Group, and marketer Andy Barwell, of golf marketing and PR specialist the Azalea Group.

The association has doubled in size during the last three years and, at the meeting, members were unanimously positive and optimistic for future progress. They expressed the view that the increasingly wide range of disciplines within the membership will continue to gain more consultancy opportunities in the marketplace, both at home and abroad. The revamped GCA website, launched in April 2014, had proved very successful in making global golf business more aware of the breadth of the specialist services members can provide and in gaining many more enquiries for those services.

Swan said, “It has been a great privilege for me to chair the association for the last two years and I am delighted to have the chance to do so for another two. It is very pleasing to see that we have so many new members, specialising in so many different sectors of the international golf business, and I can see us consolidating that position and expanding upon it during the next couple of years. I am very fortunate to have such an excellent team supporting my efforts, and we shall, collectively, be driving forward the association to reach, what I hope will be, an unrivalled position in the future.”