Category: News

How we almost pulled the pin on our “stupid idea”…

 

Part 1. GenYgolf

Four years ago we kicked-off GenYgolf with a Facebook post … no one joined up.

The goal was simple: Can we get more people playing golf?

The concept was scribbled on a post-it note. It read as follows:

1. See if we can administer handicaps
2. Organise a few events at courses we’d love to play
3. Try and negotiate 4 course discounts
4. Get 50 members in the first year
5. Give golfers some flexibility and choice
6. Create a lively and less ‘old school’ golf experience

Most of all, we wanted to create a golf community that was relaxed, where we didn’t feel out of place or embarrassed. A club that encouraged mateship linked by the game of golf.

So off we went, spritely and excited!

Our first event was solid, which was a pleasant surprise considering we had absolutely no idea what we were doing. Thirty players attended the Dunes, everyone got a free hat … no one joined up.

We were now “golf event specialists” and pumped for our second event. We went hard and even spent money on advertising. It took us 100 hours to organise the event. This was going to be HUGE … the official launch of GenYgolf … seven golfers rocked up, six of them were our mates.

Again no one joined up and we had just put on Australia’s (the world’s?!) smallest publicly advertised golf event. Shattered.

We brainstormed… “What if we got a partner course on board?” The first phone call was to an industry stalwart and his response was “in all my years in the game, this is by far the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard”. He said he’d “eat his hat if we were still around in three months time, it was a resounding no and we should quit now!” Brutal!

It was probably time to pull the pin, but for some reason we couldn’t do it. We kept plugging away, hosting stupidly small events. We kept posting on social media, we kept calling clubs.

Slowly a few members started to join. Some members even offered to help us out. To this day they are still helping out, they are the lifeblood of the club.

Thousands of hours planning, performing admin tasks, discussing ideas, testing ideas, making phone calls, answering inquiries, organising events, responding to feedback, submitting rounds, setting up partnerships, calculating scores, creating a website, posting on social media… all while managing full-time jobs, relationships, families and everything else life threw our way.

It was tough. On many occasions it nearly broke us. At times we struggled to see the point of it all.

Someone asked us the other day: “Why’d you guys keep going? The answer was simple: “Passion.” This was our passion project, we were doing something we truly loved for members that we genuinely cared for.

When you love and believe in something, it stops feeling like work after a while.

Part 2. Future Golf

Recently, I was asked “why?” Why the change to Future Golf?

I did what every normal person does when asked a difficult question. I changed the subject and took weeks to think of an answer.

Then it came to me. The answer is that we had outgrown GenYgolf. The name GenY had gone from the thing that defined us to a barrier for new members.

When we launched in 2014, it felt right. But we realised that a) nobody really knows who GenY is and who GenY isn’t and b) a lot of the people we were targeting thought they were too old to get involved.

For a non-golfer, there are enough obstacles to participation. Equipment, time, money, mates, difficulty, location. We didn’t want to make a person’s age another one.

Right now, 92 per cent of our 2000-strong membership are aged between 25 and 39. So, GenY. But we expect that to change as our offering changes.

It’s why Future Golf is the right name to carry us through our new phase. And this phase has nothing to do with when you were born.

Our core mission has always been to “grow” the game of golf. And that means a few different things. We want to:

Grow our community.

Grow our partners and the industry we’re influencing.

Grow our game.

But more than that we want to watch our members grow. The thing that gets me most excited is watching a beginner go through that journey to becoming an addict.

I’ll never get tired of the look on a new golfer’s face when they strike the ball just right for the first time. It’s the look that says: “I want to do that again. I NEED to do that again.”

I’ll never get tired of hearing a member tell me they had no one to play with before and that we’ve changed the way they look at golf. Or that the person they played with offered them a job.

Growth for us means building long lasting relationships with our partner clubs, facilities and brands. By doing that, our members reap the benefits. The pie keeps getting bigger and everyone gets a slice.

We’re growing our team, too. We started with passionate people working 18-hour days, hand delivering membership packs and entering scorecards on a Sunday night. Those same people are with us today, but so are many more.

As we head into the future, we will continue our mission to change the game of golf and how it’s viewed.

We will continue to make the game accessible, friendly, relaxed and FUN.

We will keep helping those who feel intimidated or embarrassed.

We will continue to provide our members with the best benefits and value in golf.

We will continue to support the industry by promoting our partners.

We will keep innovating, trying and testing new ideas.

We will continue to challenge the way the game is perceived to get more people playing more often.

To us, golf is more than a game, it’s a way of life. We view our community as the custodians of golf. The future of golf.

Ali Terai

CEO & Founder

A common response from non-golfers is that it is chasing a little white ball around a paddock. For the golfer, it is so much more than that.

To answer this question, you probably need to look back to when golf started for you. Most likely it was waking up early on a Sunday morning to caddy for your mother or father around a golf course when you were very young, itching for the opportunity to throw a ball onto a green and putt out after they had finished.

You probably then joined the cadet program at your local club, playing 9 holes with your mates for bragging rights, then chipping and putting while you waited to be picked up. Honing your skills in the practice net. You got your first pair of spikes and wore them out in two weeks by walking around on the concrete just to hear the brap, brap, brap as you walked.

You go on golf trips with your parents. My father and I used to drive up to the Sunshine Coast to see his parents, stopping along the way at country courses for a cheeky 18 holes here and there. It was great bonding time. My father was always a better golfer than me, even in his 70’s he plays to his handicap regularly. Still to this day when we get the opportunity to play together, we stand on that first tee and try to outdrive each other. Him straight down the guts, me off to the right behind a tree with no shot at the green.

For a lot of you, golf probably became uncool during your mid to late teens. You stop playing until you are mid 20’s and someone you met at work invites you to play a round. It bites again, you spend a fortune on new clubs, a buggy, some great outfits…your journey continues. You get a little older, get married and have kids. You suddenly realise those shiny new clubs and buggy have only seen the grass a handful of times.

At 44 years old, I dusted off my clubs which had sat idle in my garage for about 15 years. I went and hit some balls at the local driving range. There is a couple of reasons I decided to pick up my clubs again. I was looking for a way out of a hole I felt my life had put me in and I thought golf would be a way to meet some people, and I have a 4yo son who is getting to the stage in life where he wants to do stuff with his daddy. In a way I hoped that we could go on the same adventures as my father and I went on when I was young. The bug bit again.

OK, so golf is chasing a lilt ball around a paddock, but subconsciously it can be so much more than that. It is both a physical and mental competition. You against the field. You against the course. It can be a place to clear your mind of everything else in your life. It’s getting out into the sun and exercising not only your body, but your mind. It’s the sounds. while the brap, brap of steel spike on concrete is a thing of the past, there is nothing quite like the sound of a flushed drive. It’s meeting new people, building friendships that will last a lifetime.

I’m not going to make my son play golf. He comes with me to the range to hit balls and he loves it. When he gets a little older, I will see if he wants to ride in the cart with me. Whatever happens will happen. Why am I telling you this? Golf challenges me to be a better person and make better decisions on and off the golf course. It has taught me to look forward when I make mistakes not dwell on them. Above all else, golf reminds me of the most important thing in my life, my family.

Written by David Muspratt, member since February 2018

My dad, my brother and I all started playing golf when I was 11 years old. We got into it through a regular sort of pathway; a colleague of my dad played and Dad thought it would be something that the three of us could do together. So we went to a driving range, took a couple of lessons with a local pro, bought some instructional VHS tapes (showing my age here!), got some second hand clubs and went out to a few local courses. After a couple of years of paying green fees, we were all still very keen and getting better players. Dad decided to take the step and we became members at a club. The club had a decent junior section and they played matches against other clubs in the area. Dad didn’t mind ferrying us around because he got a free round as a part of the deal.

I was 16 years old and playing one of these junior matches at a course on the south coast of England. I was in a tight game against my opponent for the day. Playing the 14th hole we were about 100 meters from the green and he was hitting a wedge. I was standing probably 10 meters away, slightly in front and to the side of him, and he hit a shank. I had no time to get out of the way and the ball hit me on the side of the head just behind my left ear. I was knocked out cold but got to my feet and obviously was in some pain. We called off the game and I was able to make it back to the clubhouse.

I have no recollection of what happened after that. But my brother happened to be in the same playing group as me that day so saw the whole thing, and my dad was only a couple of groups further back. So they was able to fill in the gaps; In the clubhouse I was drifting in and out of consciousness. Someone had run back to tell my dad what had happened and he drove me to the hospital. On the way there my brother kept me awake and I was showing signs of concussion which worsened to the point where I couldn’t even recall my own name and I was just speaking total nonsense like a toddler. When we got to the hospital my condition got even worse and I had a seizure in the emergency waiting room.

The first thing I remember is seeing a light moving around in front of my eyes. I was lying under a CAT Scanner which was taking an imagine of my brain. The scan revealed that I had a subdural haematoma (a bleed on the brain) as a result of the golf ball hitting me. It was not a serious bleed, but it kept me in hospital for about a week while I was kept under observation. I was told that I was actually quite fortunate that the ball hit me where it did. A couple of inches either way and it could have been a lot worse. But ultimately there was nothing to be immediately worried about.

This didn’t keep me away from the golf course and I played again only a couple of weeks after getting out of the hospital. But I certainly became more cautious about where I was standing!

In the following years I went to Uni, where I played no golf at all for 3 years. But I picked it up again after finishing and started playing to a good standard, probably the best I have ever played and good enough to be picked for the 1st team at my club for a few matches. Then one day while I was at work, I think I was 21 at the time, I got an enormous pain in my head, collapsed and had another seizure. So I went back to hospital again and had more scans. They didn’t show anything obvious but picked up a small amount of scar tissue in the same place as my original injury. The diagnosis was epilepsy and that the seizure had been caused as a result of this scarring and therefore it was likely to happen again.

It was a shock to have the epilepsy diagnosis, especially 5 years after the actual injury. But it didn’t affect my day to day lifestyle apart from the fact that I couldn’t drive a car for at least a year. And in terms of playing golf, not being able to drive anywhere is a serious handicap (pun not intended). So I became a part time golfer, reliant on friends and family giving me a lift to and from the golf course. And unfortunately for me, this became a repeat cycle for a few years. I would be “seizure free” for a couple of years, get my driving license back, then have another seizure and be back to square one. And so I was never able to play regular golf. I came to Australia in 2004, met my wife and made my home in Sydney. I met a few guys who were casual golfers so played the occasional round with them. But I was still going through my “seizure cycles” so always relying on someone for a lift somewhere. There were times when the seizures were worse and more regular than at other times, but I think between me and my neurologist we have got it figured out. It’s been about 5 years since my last seizure and hopefully it is under control now.

I always feel like I missed the best years of my golfing life (at least in terms of physical ability and free time to play) as a result of my epilepsy. I don’t complain about having the epilepsy because the bigger picture is that compared to other people who have it, my condition is mild. Golf has always been something I wanted to play more regularly. Because like all golfers, I’m always hopeful that my game will improve, that the next round will be a good one and that I think I’m not playing to my potential. But the fact of just having the ability to get to the course and play is always in the back of my mind and so I’m grateful for that.

I have a young family now, a 9 to 5 job, and a mortgage to pay. So unless I win big on the lotto, becoming a member at club isn’t a realistic option for me now. And my mates who play golf aren’t as keen as I am for a game. So when GenYgolf started up in NSW it sounded like a perfect arrangement for me. And it has met and surpassed my expectations. For me the main benefit is just having the opportunity of a regular game. But I’m genuinely proud to be a member of a club that provides so many options for playing as well as the other benefits to all of its members without the obligations that a club membership involves.

Written by Graham Hill, member since 2017