The USGA’s Strategic Pivot Toward Facilities and Public Golf
March 09, 2020
Most anniversaries begin with a retrospective. The USGA Green Section commences its 100th anniversary with a prospective – a reimagining of its services and offerings to bring them in alignment with the pillars of the USGA strategic plan announced to the world Feb. 29 by USGA Executive Director Mike Davis at the USGA’s 125th Annual Meeting.
The key pillars: A focus on golf facilities in general and public golf facilities in specific. More accurately, a recognition that the “sustainability” pillar the USGA added to its strategic quiver some years ago necessarily involves more than environmental sustainability; it involves economic and social sustainability as well. And it particularly involves economic and social health at the nation’s municipal golf courses, the places where the game has been introduced, grown and sustained for generations.
Less than one week after Mike Davis announced these pivots, the USGA asked its SCGA partner on the ground in Southern California to invite the region’s municipalities, ownership/management groups, and allied associations to a meeting where the USGA’s Green Section and Regional Affairs Departments might gain insights as to how best to create services and offerings capable of bringing value to public sector golf in Southern California. A conversation among allies in a common cause, not a lecture from a distant ivory tower.
That SCGA facilitated conversation took place last Thursday at Skylinks @ Long Beach, one of the City of Long Beach’s five municipally owned golf courses, a 3-hour conversation that:
- Shared the USGA’s preliminary ideas about products and programs specifically geared to the public sector;
- Received ample input from the assembled government officials, management/ownership groups and allied associations about those preliminary ideas;
- Entertained a bevy of ideas about what the USGA might do in terms of specific products, programs and/or direct assistance to best assist Southern California’s public courses; and
- Engaged the assemblage in an honest and open dialog about the USGA’s relationship with public golf in Southern California.
The fact that the Executive Directors of the SCGA, Southern California PGA Section, California Golf Course Owners Association, and Southern California Chapter Golf Course Superintendents Association were in attendance is testament to just how much importance these leadership organizations place on the health of the municipal game. The Vice-President of the American Association of Golf Course Architects also graced the assembly with his presence – an indicator of just how much energy that sector of the industry is putting into reimagining and revitalizing the public game for 21st Century relevance.
Where to from here? For the USGA no doubt more of these regional listening and learning sessions. For the SCGA, continuing to act as a conduit for the dissemination of those services and offerings once the USGA is finished reimagining them for public sector specific utility. For the ownership/management groups, government employees and allied associations in the room, the use of those services and offerings to be sure, but perhaps more importantly, a more direct and productive relationship with the game’s self-proclaimed “governor” to replace the relationship that they have long been characterized as distant and removed.
At the beginning of 2020, the SCGA's advocacy efforts pinpointed 2020 as the year it got “serious” about addressing what is fast becoming an existential crisis in the region’s municipal sector. If last week’s affair in Long Beach is any indication, the game is fast coming to the same conclusion. And that should give Southern California public players pause for optimism; the pain you’re feeling has been recognized by your leadership organizations, and they are now laser focused on dulling it.
This meeting was not a “one-and-done” effort. The USGA’s strategic pivots towards facilities and public golf are long-term and substantive; they will unfold over time. The SCGA will continue to play the role of facilitator, communicator, aggregator and stimulator. Stay tuned.