Loch Ness junior Treasurer wins Club double for second year

As one of the first clubs to embrace the national junior golf programme, clubgolf, Loch Ness Golf Club’s junior membership has moved impressively over the 200 mark.

Equally startling are the numbers of children on its clubgolf coaching programme – some 150 at last count and most of them from non golfing families, introduced to the game through clubgolf’s introductory in-school game, firstclubgolf.

Few are more delighted with the success of the Club’s programme than its orchestrator, the Club’s Junior Convenor Richard Treasurer, who with his team of five PGA qualified volunteer coaches has achieved success on a grand scale in the last six years.

And no one is more proud than Richard whose son has emerged as one of the early success stories from the clubgolf programme he set up. Last weekend, 17 year old Jamie Treasurer became the Club’s senior and junior champ for the second year in a row.

“I wasn’t the top qualifier going into the Match Play stages but I won quite comfortably throughout,” said Jamie. “I won my quarter final 8 and 7, my semi final 7 and 6 and the final 3 & 2.

“In the final I played the same person (senior member, David Joel) as I did last year, when I won 2 & 1, and I felt I’d improved a lot over the year.”

With such a large base of junior players it was only a matter of time before one emerged to start challenging the seniors. Jamie, a primary school pupil at the time, had hardly swung a club before becoming one of the Club’s first intake of clubgolf recruits.

Since then he has progressed to lessons with the Club’s Pro, Martin Piggott. At the same time as he has reduced his handicap to two he has begun featuring in the latter stages of national events. In last month’s SGU Boys’ Stroke Play event at Blairgowrie he made the cut for the last 40 places.

“He has certainly come a long way since the wee boy who started in the very early days of clubgolf,” said delighted father, Richard Treasurer.

“We’ve got quite a number of juniors on our clubgolf programme that are showing promise and there are a few that will be competing at Jamie’s level in two or three years’ time.”

Launched by Colin Montgomerie in 2003 as a lasting legacy to host the Ryder Cup, clubgolf is a partnership between the Scottish Golf Union, Scottish Ladies’ Golfing Association, Professional Golfers’ Association, the Golf Foundation and sportscotland.

clubgolf is nearing its ultimate target of giving all 50,000 nine year olds in Scotland the opportunity to play golf. This year alone, 33,466 of Scotland’s Primary 5 children experienced clubgolf. Meanwhile 232 clubs across Scotland and a volunteer workforce of 1128 qualified coaches are delivering the programme.
Hugely successful in Highland, 90 percent of schools are delivering firstclubgolf and 35 golf clubs are providing junior clubgolf coaching.
As a front runner in the programme, Loch Ness Golf Club is one of the many clubs in Scotland to see the benefits.

“I’d like to thank Neil Hampton, Loch Ness Golf Club Secretary and qualified PGA Level 1 coach, for the amount of time and effort he puts into helping with the junior section and also to Fairways Leisure, owners of the Loch Ness Golf Course, who have been so supportive of the junior section from the outset,” said Richard Treasurer.

“Our clubgolf coaching is going from strength to strength and we are increasing the number of coaches each year.

“We’ve got quite a few people that are willing to help out each week and we couldn’t coach these numbers if we didn’t have our clubgolf coaches.

“Most of these kids wouldn’t have had the opportunity to play golf and it’s great to see them coming through.

“When you see Jamie who literally started as a little boy that had never hit a golf ball before and he’s now coming right through the ranks it’s very satisfying."