One Sunday in Cronulla, nearly 180 women walked onto a golf course…
Women of all ages, from first-timers to seasoned players, walk out of the clubhouse and up the 18th fairway together towards a DJ lounge that has absolutely no business being on a golf course. Waiting for them: welcome drinks, a matcha station, pastries from We Are Flour, a grazing table, the DJ setting the mood. They’re laughing with strangers. They look completely at ease, like they belong there.Because they do.
This is just one of the Golf Fore Her events. And if you haven’t heard of them yet, you will.
The numbers alone are enough to make the golf industry sit up. Nearly 180 registrants. Average age 26. Thirty percent travelling from outside the local area. Not a single dollar spent on paid marketing. Every woman who showed up found her way here through a friend, a post, a story shared on a phone screen.
“There’s more demand than we even know what to do with,” says Bec Smith, founder of Golf Fore Her. Smith leads the commercial and strategic vision alongside her husband James Edge, a PGA professional who brings more than 15 years of coaching expertise. “I think that creates another challenge, because golf clubs, coaches and facilities can all become a bit territorial. But I don’t think there’s space for that mentality anymore.”
Smith started Golf Fore Her with a simple observation: golf is intimidating. The unspoken rules. The assumed knowledge. The sense that you need a handicap, your own clubs and a playing partner before you’re allowed to begin. “We’re really passionate about getting people actually onto the golf course,” she says. “Physically stepping onto a course feels overwhelming for a lot of people. That’s really where it all started.”
David Scott, general manager at Cronulla Golf Club, was an early champion of the concept. The club sits at about 18.5 percent female membership, a figure Scott is candid about wanting to change. “I think it really is a great place for women once they know about it and realise how relaxed and fun we are,” he says.
Speaking to the women on the day, two barriers kept coming up: intimidation and the sheer scale of the game. Eighteen holes feels like a big ask when you’re not even sure golf is for you yet. Golf Fore Her didn’t eliminate those feelings, but it dissolved them slowly over the course of an afternoon. PGA pros and tour pros shuttled between holes on carts stocked with drinks and pastries, there for one reason only: to cheer you on.
Golf NSW played a critical role in making it possible. Tahnia Stalker from Golf NSW was coaching on the course on the day and the impact she witnessed was immediate.
“There was a woman in my group who could hit a great ball, yet had never stepped foot on a golf course before,” she says. “By the end of the day she said that when she got home, she would absolutely make the effort to start playing on course. That in itself says everything.”
Cronulla also made its own history about the same time. Suzanne Wilson became the club’s first ever female captain. A 28-year member who has held the ladies captain position twice, she was out on the course watching so many women discover a game she has loved her entire adult life.
“The heart of playing golf is the social aspect,” she says. “The 19th hole is actually what golf is all about. Meeting new people, trying to do your best, some days better than others.”
It is exactly what these women came for. Exactly what will bring them back. So where does women’s golf go from here?
“Clubs are brilliant at running clinics,” says Smith. “But a clinic with no next step is just a nice time. The real work is what comes after and that infrastructure mostly doesn’t exist yet.”
The gap sits between where women enter the game and where the game asks them to go next. A clinic ends, enthusiasm is high and the next visible step is an 18-hole handicap membership, a leap most women aren’t ready for. What’s missing is everything in between.
“The gap we’re focused on isn’t at the top of the game,” Smith says. “It’s everything that happens between a woman picking up a club for the first time and actually feeling like she belongs on a course.
“That’s where the opportunity is, for everyone.”
