A PGA Professional for the past 47 years, Allan Telford was honoured with the Services to Golf award at the South Australian Golf Industry Awards Night in October. Here he shares his philosophy on growing the game at every age. Written with Tony Webeck
It’s trying to grow the game, trying to grow clubs, which is important. Help clubs in developing their membership, which is hard to do, because generally the people at the club lack the confidence to step up and lead the way so they generally call on a PGA Professional to do that for them.
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The golf course serves as a nice greenbelt in a lot of small country towns but it’s also a gathering point for community. A lot of the country clubs not only use their venues for golf, but they might use them for weddings and funeral services and that type of thing. A golf club certainly adds something to a country town.
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In those towns you’ve got to get to know the people first and you’ve got to show a genuine interest. You’ve got to show a genuine interest in what they’re trying to do and what they’re trying to achieve. Clinics at the local school, fostering some kids out of the school to come over to the golf club and showing the club how to do that. That’s very important.
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You’ve got to have the strongest primary schools program you possibly can because that’s where your golfers are coming from. Twenty per cent of your population is in schools. You get them at a young age, you’ve got every chance to get them into the game for life. I spent 20 years at Tea Tree Gully Golf Club, which has a thousand members, so it’s a busy club to get juniors on the golf course. But to keep working, keep grinding at the development of juniors in those clubs, is so important.
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If you’re getting one kid in the school ground to come over to the golf club and stay there for 20 years, at a club like Tea Tree Gully, that’s a fair few gold nuggets to get into the club. Clubs have to recognise that every kid in the school yard is a little gold nugget.
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I fell in love with golf through watching Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf on the ABC on Friday nights and then I went out and created a little six-hole golf course in a paddock about a couple hundred metres from my house.
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Junior golf in our town was started with all the kids. We all played golf, and we went up there and started mucking around for a few weeks, and all of a sudden the adults took an interest in what we were doing. A couple of mums of the kids started running a bit of a program for us and that’s how we started junior golf in Pinnaroo.
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We run our South Australian primary schools competition statewide. The year I got involved they were down to 39 kids participating and I thought, Well this is no good. We have 16 qualifier regions, 22 events. We make sure that wherever a kid is in the state, there’s a qualifier that they can get to. My goal is to get 480 kids at that qualifying stage. We’re up to about 320 now and we bring 160 of those kids to Adelaide to play at the state final, made up of 80 metropolitan kids and 80 country kids.
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I’m happy with where the school program is going but you’ve got to keep pushing, keep going with that. I’ve been lucky to be in this industry for 47 years. I’m lucky that it hasn’t been one thing. I’ve done a lot of things in the golf industry. That’s been a very good thing. Staying passionate for the game is a key to it all. I still want to get people playing, encourage people all the time to keep playing. It’s a challenge this sport but it’s a great sport for life.
• To find a pathway into junior golf in your region visit golf.org.au/mygolf/home or sportaus.gov.au/schools
