We have always had a strong involvement with Hampshire Golf but at present Presidents of both Hampshire PGA and Hampshire Ladies Golf are AGC members: Malcolm and Jane Scott. That’s not to mention the other Past Captains and AGC members on Hampshire Committees.

This month I interview Jane to find out what she has been doing for Hampshire.

Editor: Although many members know you well, some new members don’t. So, tell us a bit about yourself

Jane: I Joined AGC at the age of 11, in 1974 with my twin sister Sue. Both my parents are members, Brian and Carole Young. Dad joined in the 50’s and both are Past Captains (together in 2002).  Junior golf at Alresford in the 70’s had few girls but we were very fortunate as the ladies really encouraged us. I am married to Malcolm with 2 children, both former AGC members. Malcolm became Head Professional here in 1980 and later I joined Malcolm in the shop for many years, getting to know our members.

Editor: How did you get into Hampshire golf?

Jane: My daughter Becky was taking part in junior County coaching and whilst taking Becky along to County junior events, I became interested in helping. From 2007-2009 I was County Junior Organiser for the girls which involved arranging tuition programs, matches and Junior County Match Week playing teams from Surrey Sussex, Middlesex and Kent.

I am a keen golfer and have played in the County 2^nd and Senior teams. I was lucky enough to be selected as County Captain in 2016 and in 2021 asked to be County President, having been nominated by past Presidents. I started this role in January 2022 which lasts for 3 years.

Editor: What is the President’s role? More than just wining and dining?

Jane: There really isn’t very much wining and dining!

Primarily I oversee the running of our County ladies golf, supporting our various events and enjoy watching the progress of our girls and ladies teams.  The highlight of the year is our Championship Week, our 1^st Team (CMW) and Junior County Match Weeks (JCMW) formats where some excellent amateur golf is played.  This year’s JCMW is being held by Hampshire at Hockley GC 7-9 August and next year’s CMW at North Hants GC in July 2024.

Editor: You must be so proud of your recent shortlisting as County of the Year?

Jane: Yes, especially pleasing as it was voted on by our peers at England Golf.  It was nice to be recognised and rewarded for all the hard work by many volunteers over a number of years. We focus on supporting golf for everyone, juniors and ladies. Three counties were shortlisted, and we were pipped by Bedfordshire.

There were 250 people at the Award Ceremony in Manchester, hosted superbly by Clare Balding.

Editor: What is your ambition for Ladies golf in Hampshire?

Jane: To maintain our excellent golf opportunities for our junior and lady golfers.

Members, both ladies and men may not realise they pay an Affiliation fee in their Club subscriptions, which is forwarded to their relevant County body to help with the running of County activities.

We are fortunate to have a hard working volunteer Board, who give up a great amount of their time to ensure everything is run smoothly.

Ladies county golf in Hampshire isn’t just about our “elite” players, competitive golf run by the County is available to every level of junior and lady golfer.  We have an excellent junior pathway programme in place, which we hope will help maintain golfers in Hampshire for many years to come.

To win either or both JCMW or CMW whilst it is on “home” soil over the next couple of years, would be a great achievement, whilst I am in the role of President.

At Alresford, we are lucky to have Ann Younger as our ladies club delegate. Ann does a great job keeping our ladies informed of all our County events.  Alresford ladies seem to enjoy entering our competitions too!!

Allena Doley, one of our lady members is currently our County Vets Captain and I wish Allena an enjoyable 2 years in her role.

Administration & Governance Review

We are formally reviewing our Administration and Governance arrangements with our General Manager to ensure that we keep pace with guidance from England Golf and to ensure that our systems, processes and supporting roles continuously improve.

Our current twin-committee structure is very effective and well established for nearly 20 years; our Captain’s Committee run golf matters and the Management Committee runs the business side of the Club. The Club Vice-Captain each year serves as a voting member of the seven-person Management Committee which maintains a conduit between the two. This stacks up well against the guidance from England Golf.

The Management Committee receives reports and recommendations from five sub-committees; Bar & Catering, Greens, House, Finance, and Planning and Development. The Management Committee also supports the work of our General Manager and provides direction where required together with other emerging issues. This ensures highly-collaborative and transparent governance and the opportunity for each sub-committee Chair to develop ideas and suggestions within their committees to bring to the Management Committee.

The Club is particularly strong in the governance of spending through our annual budgets and governance of any additional spend which requires sanction by our Finance Committee chaired by David Crawshaw.

The Administration and Governance review will take three or four weeks to complete and will report through the Management Committee.

Social Events

Our Club has a long and successful history of supporting social events, which are becoming ever popular; led by Steve Johnson, Chair of the Social Committee. I recently attended the landmark Fawlty Towers dinner with around 70 other members, which was just brilliant and incredibly energetic for the cast. The Social Committee have already provided multiple quiz evenings, a Horse Racing Event, New Years Eve, Captains Dinner and have in place a Caribbean Cruise event happening in two-weeks’ time plus the return of the highly popular, floor-filling band Midwich Dawn which coincides with the return of the Captain’s Week participants from St Mellion.

My enormous thanks go out to Steve and the whole of the Social Committee for their energy and dedication to our enjoyment of our golf club.

Robert White

Chair of the Management Committee

Well, that was a wet month!

March started with several of the Vets, Ladies and intra club winter league matches being completed, after postponements from previous weeks. Mixed results but good luck to the teams and individuals who have gone through to latter stages.

In early March the Men’s team had super competitive match with the County Juniors, with Alresford coming out on top 3 ½ – 2 ½. It was a delight to see Hampshire’s fine young talent. The Men’s friendly season then opened with a triangular match involving Alton and Tylney Park in which we were also victorious.

May I recommend all members familiarise themselves with our friendly matches, Vets, Ladies, Mixed and Mens. This year I would like to see the greatest participation across the whole club. All information is available on ClubV1 and on various notice boards. It is a great way to enjoy golf with different people and on other courses, which is only going to help your game. And for those wishing to participate in the more competitive club fixtures it will hone your match skills and give all our dedicated match managers food for thought when selecting our club teams. If you are representing Alresford in a team match, please wear club colours. Alresford continue to subsidise all team shirts by 25%, so place your order in the ProShop.

The Captain/Pro Challenge for 2023 is open for bookings through the ProShop. Mark and I will accept challenges from any pair. The Competition is informal but still just the right amount of spice!

All proceeds to Captains Charity, suggested minimum donation £20 a pair.  Booking through ProShop only.  4BBB, Pro to play off Scratch.  1 slot per week (around 4pm, usually Thursday), April – October. If you need to play another day other than a Thursday Mark and I will do our very best to find the right day and time for you. Vice-Captain to stand in for Captain if unavailable, Assistant Professional for Mark. Finally, a huge thank to our great Head Professional for giving up his time every week to help raise money for the Captains Charity – really appreciated Mark, thank you.

Curly’s Cup was a wet and windy one, but well done to all of those who persevered. Our first mixed two-day competition, Linnets, takes place on Good Friday and Easter Saturday.

For further information on any competition, thanks to the efforts of Ken Coburn, the website diary has a short description and format, you just need to click on the diary entry. If you read anything that is not clear, helpful feedback is always appreciated, just let me or the office know.

It is great to see the first modern looking Honours Boards on the wall of the refurbished clubhouse. The next ones, Club Championship and its derivative competitions, are being worked on and should be hopefully installed by the end of May. We are indebted to ‘the 100 Club’ for funding these initial boards. To all new members, and existing members who have never got round to it, please see the details further in this edition and contact Pat Wallis and get yourself into the monthly prize draw (and help AGC at the same time!).

Simon Freemantle

Captain

SAVE THE DATE Club Championship 24^th & 25^th June 2023

The C&H Committee are meeting at the end of the week, the major topic on the agenda will be the administration of the Club Championship.  Keep an eye out for full details, including qualifying criteria, how to enter and entry deadlines.

Knockout Competitions

Entry for our summer knockout competitions have now closed and entry numbers have been good, but overall slightly down from 2022.

The Wessex and Ross competitions closed on 26^th March and the draw will be published this week.

May I remind everyone that each side has equal responsibility to arrange matches.  No extension to play by dates are permitted (other than the final and then only a the discretion of the C&H Committee in consultation with the Club Captain) so it is recommended matches are diarised as early as possible.

In addition, when arranging 2 ball knockout matches it is advisable to avoid, if possible, busy Saturday competition morning.

CHARITY COMPETITIONS

Thank you to everybody who took part in our annual RNLI charity event which raised £234.

Congratulations to our winner Ralph Bottemley scoring an impressive 40 points.

CURLY’S CUP

Our first major of the year took place last weekend, unfortunately the weather was not kind to players on Day 2 and the course was restricted to “carry only”, however the scoring was still good.

Congratulations to our winner(s):

*not in places 1^st -5^th

And finally…… A Reminder

Don’t forget to keep sufficient money on Member’s cards to allow entry into competitions.

Gill Freemantle

Chair Competitions & Handicap Committee, Handicap Secretary

handicaps@alresfordgolf.co.uk

March marks the start of the new season for the Vets which traditionally opens with the Vets Captain v Vice Captain Competition. This year the competition was scheduled for the 8 March which happened to be the very day that the snow returned to Alresford. Nearly an inch of snow fell the previous night, the course was closed and the competition was cancelled. We are hoping to reschedule the event to later in the season, more news to follow.

At least the weather did not intervene in the second of our season opening events, the Vets and Ladies Breeze-up on 21 March, where forty eight golfers enjoyed a friendly but competitive round of golf followed by high tea in the clubhouse. Gunnel and I played in the first group against Ewan McGregor and Jo Youngs and whilst we had a very enjoyable day we were comfortably beaten. The overall winners were Jacqui Sanger and Jeff Staines who are seen below collecting their prizes from Ewan and myself.

The first of our summer friendly matches at home against Petersfield took place on 15 March and our winter form continued into the spring, we lost narrowly by 3:4. Having said this we lost three of the seven matches by 1 Down, the luck just was not with us. From now onwards we will be playing matches just about every week so if you would like to give this a go please contact me, sign up via ClubV1 or via the Vets noticeboard. Our policy is for maximum participation and everyone will be given the chance to play.

Now for some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that we failed to retain the Winter League trophy this season, as announced last month, but the good news is that Salisbury & South  Wilts beat Royal Winchester in the very last match of the competition which meant that we did not finish last in the league! We will aim to do better next season.

Vets Captain

Steve Oldham

I enjoyed a round with the editor of FORE last weekend, both the company and the greens were excellent. However, for a number of reasons some parts of the course are looking the worse for wear. The greenkeeping team continue to get the course ready for the beginning of the golf season proper, traditionally Easter weekend, but we all need to play our part. To that end can members please;

• replace divots (no matter how fragmented)
• repair pitch marks – if you pitch onto the green from more than 20 yards you will almost certainly mark the green
• carry if you can and if not, keep powered trolleys and buggies to the rough if at all possible.
• keep trolleys and buggies at least 3m from the greens.

Soil temperatures have been high enough for the grass to grow this past week (week before Curly’s Cup) and you can see areas starting to recover which is good news, particularly for the extended fifth tee, the swale and all the bare areas we are trying to repair.

The greenkeeping team have applied a granular fertiliser recently, this concludes the greens maintenance operations for now. Unfortunately this was delayed because we needed rainfall to wash in the fertiliser. The team have started the fortnightly applications of spring/summer liquid nitrogen. This helps to keep the greens strong and healthy. Weather and temperatures permitting we will lower the greens cutting height to 4mm from Curly’s weekend and further aeration will be required as we go through April. Green surrounds will soon be fertilised with a product that has a controlled release over a four-to-five-month period.

Those of you who played at the weekend will have noted that the tees have been hollow tined, seeded and fertilised with some top dressing applied to the worn areas. Tees are cut at 10mm now and cutting will be done twice weekly. Fairways are still being cut at 19mm due to wet conditions. Conditions permitting Simon and the team will fertilise the fairways as soon as possible after Curly’s weekend but the scarifying will have to wait until we get some drier conditions. We are most concerned about the fairways on holes 9,11,12 and 18 they particularly suffer from lack of sunlight, caused by shading, and worm casts. So please help us to help you by following the requests bulleted above. Grass paths will also be fertilised with a 4-5 month controlled release at the same time as the greens surrounds.

The team check the sand depths in the bunkers regularly and all bunkers are back in play. Turf humus/mulch has been applied, as a dressing, to the bunker surrounds in a bid to hold moisture as these areas dry out in the summer. Bunker edges will be trimmed as we go into April.

The major winter projects, the fifth tee extension, the swale beside the first green and the condition of the bunkers are nearing completion. However, the team will continue to improve the paths (grass and otherwise), including edges. You’ll note the frugal and effective use of cores removed from the greens recently on worn or disturbed areas of turf.

Finally, volunteering is a strong feature of Alresford Golf Club and it is part of what sets us apart, as a members club, from proprietary clubs. So, I’m asking you to pitch in and help the greens team help you. Please come along and join in with the “Annual Divotting Party” on Thursday 27^th April – details in General Managers section below and to follow in “Members’ Updates”. Thank you to all our volunteers!

Derek Myers

Chair of Greens