The Girls in Golf group at the launch of thr programme at Duns GC

Duns gets girl friendly

Duns Golf Club, which joined forces with the national junior golf strategy, clubgolf, this spring to begin introducing its community’s children to the game, is taking extra steps to encourage girls.

The Club, which trained up three of its members to become volunteer coaches this spring, has since attracted almost 50 children who have experienced clubgolf’s introductory game, firstclubgolf, at school.

“Since we started clubgolf this year, 48 primary kids have come to the Club for coaching and 34 have come along on a regular basis,” said Graham Clark, one of the Club’s volunteer coaches.

“Around 10 of this number were girls but we could see they were being a bit overshadowed by the boys. They were getting a bit de-motivated because they weren’t hitting the ball as well or as far as the boys.  So we put a letter out asking them if they would like a girls only session and the result was yes they would.

“On Sunday we held our first Girls Only session. From the 10 we had six come along and we had another two new girls who had never picked it up before.  The feedback we’ve had from the weekend is that they preferred being coached in a group with other girls.”

clubgolf, the partnership between the Scottish Golf Union, the Scottish Ladies' Golfing Association, the Professional Golfers' Association, the Golf Foundation and sportscotland which emerged from Scotland’s successful bid to host the Ryder Cup, recognises the need to redress the balance of the shortage of girls playing the game.

Its research in 2005 showed there were fewer than 50,000 female golf club members (as opposed to 198,500 male club golfers).  In the under 18 level, there were 25,000 boys but just 2,700 girls.

So successful were three girls-only pilots in Grampian that the programme - which is endorsed by leading Scotland lady golfers, Catriona Matthew and Kathryn Imrie – is now being rolled out across Scotland.

 

“It’s about introducing them to the game, seeing if it’s for them and then helping them,” said Mr Clark, who has also extended his remit to coach the Club’s juniors who have handicaps.

“If the local Primary children find out it’s a game they want to play then we’d be delighted to see them.  If they have an aptitude we will progress them through as far as we can.”

“We’ve also got involved a few kids from the junior section who already have handicaps but we thought could benefit from a more structured set up. We set up blocks of coaching sessions then progressed it to further coaching with the Pro from Dunbar Golf Club.”

Parents of primary school aged girls who are interested in learning to play golf should contact Duns GC Junior Convenor, Ann Wood on Tel: 01361 882695