Good Afternoon All
We hope you are all surviving the lockdown and managing to fill in your days away from the golf club. It certainly is strange and sometimes trying times. We thought we would give you a little update on what is happening at St Clair Golf Club while in lockdown. We have been working with NZ Golf to try and get a resolution to enable our greenkeepers access onto the course. You may have seen the news article in which Patrick was part of and again on “The Hits” yesterday with Steve Brocklebank’s interview. We are all working hard to try and make this happen. Hopefully the excellent politicking work coordinated by NZ Golf will result in a positive outcome shortly. We will have on our facebook page in the next couple of days a petition for you to sign if you wish to which will then be collated and sent to NZ Golf for them to use.
Aside from that, the enormity of the COVID-19 situation and the potential long term effects it will have on trading, course and staff, is very apparent the lockdown is also creating numerous stress points for our members. We are working on the following:
Safety
Information coming from government seems to indicate that whether we go to a safety level 2 or 3 and if we are able to play, the same cleaning, social distancing, and participation security measures, that affect an individual's state of health to be able to play, etc. will still be needed. We as a club are working on a lot of procedures and policies that will need to be implemented to ensure the safety or our members and staff things like cleaning, social distancing, personal hygiene, safe practice playing, and admission restrictions if you are feeling unwell, etc. are widely known and will be enforced. People need to feel confident to come back and play.
Membership
How are we going to attract members back now. A key part is giving you the confidence that you can play in a safe environment, as mentioned above, but a lot we know will have had income affected through changes to employment. We have already offered one month’s membership to be put onto your membership card, this will be reassessed as soon as we know when the lockdown will be downgraded. A few of you have taken the opportunity to “Opt” out and leave the money in the clubs account. We are very thankful for this and now open this up to all our members if they so wish. The first priority, after ensuring our courses are safe, is to focus on ensuring we maximise the number of existing members return to play.
Questions/Ideas
We would love to hear any questions you may have and will ensure that these are all answered. Many of you have great ideas on how we can revamp our club under these times and we would love to hear these. Please feel free to email me at manager@stclairgolf.co.nz.
Newsletter
Wayne is working on a newsletter for us all which we hope to have out next week. If any of you have anything to add to this I know he would like to hear. Please email me with any articles etc you may have and I will forward these to him.
Surveillance
As many of you know especially those that live close to the course we have had a lot of people walking the course. We have had many neighbours and members asking if it is ok to walk the course – we encourage that as you are our only security at the moment. Whilst we don’t mind that happening if they are keeping off the greens we still would like to reiterate that if walking with dogs these must be on a leash and any droppings must be picked up. No bikes allowed and definitely no cars or motorbikes. No playing in the bunkers. If you see any of these activities that are a concern to you and you classify as vandalism then please contact the police on 105.police.govt.nz or ring the 105 number, alternatively just have a quiet word to them and ask them to respect the course.
Lastly and most importantly Stay Safe, Look after your family and Be Kind to each other
Annette
General Manager