History

The SCGA: A century of service to Southern California Golfers

The Southern California Golf Association celebrated the centennial of its founding in 1999 by looking back on how we began one hundred years before (View SCGA Centennial series HERE). Americans living in the year 1899 were looking forward to a new century with a mixture of anticipation and concern. Barely a year before, the Spanish American War had broken out after the battleship Maine had blown up in the harbor at Havana, Cuba. Counterbalancing that grim news was a mood of optimism and hope which buoyed most Americans.

Nowhere was that spirit more evident than in Southern California. The population of Los Angeles had climbed past the one million mark, and an increasingly large number of settlers from the East Coast were golfers. To serve their needs, representatives of five golf clubs met to form the SCGA. Two of those charter clubs -- The Los Angeles Country Club and Redlands Country Club -- are still members; the others were Riverside Polo and GC (members of which later founded The Victoria Club), Santa Monica CC and Pasadena GC.

From those humble beginnings has evolved one of the nation's largest and oldest regional golf associations. By 1925, the SCGA had grown to 45 clubs. In 1971, the SCGA merged with the San Diego County Golf Association to bring the total membership to 171 clubs. In 1981, affiliate member status was created for groups that didn’t have their own golf courses. That program (the first in the nation) has spread throughout Southern California and become a model for other golf associations.

In 1994, the SCGA purchased The SCGA Golf Course, an 18-hole, Robert Trent Jones, Sr.-designed course located in Murrieta in southern Riverside County. SCGA members receive a preferential green\cart fee when they play the course, and the course welcomes tournament play by SCGA member clubs, particularly affiliate clubs.