Another busy season for juniors at Stranraer Golf Club

Over the past few years Friday evenings have become well established as Junior Night at Stranraer Golf Club (report by the volunteer coaches Jim Burns, Stuart Forsyth and Neville Wright).

Between April and September from 4 o’clock a small group of members voluntarily give up their time to help out. As a team they perform a variety of important organisational, coaching and officiating tasks for the club’s huge junior section. There are three clubgolf coaches who focus on the vital area of grass roots and introduce the game to two large groups of children taking them through the clubgolf syllabus before they are allowed on to the golf course. There are often examples of fast tracking in this instance as individual boys and girls exhibit an enviable natural ability to swing a golf club. Indeed this season has seen twenty boys and girls graduate from this programme. They move on in turn to play in nine, twelve and ultimately eighteen hole competitions. This makes for a very busy first tee as school finishes and the weekend begins.

One of Stranraer Golf Club’s Junior Section’s strategic objectives is to facilitate the development of the significant group of young players who have a handicap of eighteen plus. To this end three free coaching days were organised for the start, middle and end of the school summer holidays. Tuition was provided by a local PGA teaching professional with funds belonging to the Junior Section meeting all costs. Between sixteen and twenty-four boys and girls attended each day. The success of the initiative can be measured by the lowering of handicaps over the seven week period. Importantly, this objective remains a work in progress with every future school holiday now having coaching day(s) allocated for this group.

Another strategic objective is in line with clubgolf’s “Girls in Golf” initiative. In this instance part of our success can be measured by the increase in girls who attend both the aforementioned coaching and competitions on offer each Friday evening and 2008 has seen our junior girls’ membership double in size from a group of twelve to one of twenty-four! Equally important here was the selection of two of the group for the “SLGA’s Talent Identification Day” held recently at Brucefield’s Golf Centre near Stirling.

Not to be outdone, there were also successful performances from a group of junior boys playing out of Stranraer Golf Club. These include wining junior open competitions held at neighbouring clubs, representation in regional age group teams and competing with considerable success in adult competitions at local and regional level.

Additional highlights of the summer saw bus groups of Stranraer juniors travelling to support competitions at both Southerness Golf Club and Troon Golf Club where considerable success was achieved in a number of categories.

Finally, Stranraer Golf Club held its annual Open Senior/junior competition in mid-July this year. The greensomes format was enjoyed by an increased entry of thirty-nine teams with considerable support coming from mums, dads, uncles and aunties from neighbouring golf clubs. Naturally sponsors were delighted and the event has already been established in next year’s fixture list.

All in all then, a successful junior season but not one that could be described as ‘one-off’; Stranraer Golf Club has been successfully developing the clubgolf programme over a period of five years. Our rural setting has been employed as a clear advantage where limited healthy lifestyle opportunities and physical activity alternatives enable golf to be a major factor in the lives of our young people. With over one hundred and thirty junior members the future looks very bright indeed; a continued policy of inclusion for all boys and girls where traditional barriers are broken down is clearly working, resulting in increased junior participation in this corner of south-west Scotland.