Royal Winchester Golf Club in Hampshire is honoured to have been awarded the English Golf Union (EGU) / English Women's Golf Association (EWGA) GolfMark Award, incorporating Sport England's Clubmark.

The club has a solid base that has provided a warm and friendly club environment for men's, ladies and senior golf over the past 119 years. To safeguard the future of the club a greater emphasis on junior golf was required to create an environment that provides first class opportunities for juniors in terms of playing and coaching, club environment and child protection policies and procedures.

Continuity was considered a vital ingredient in creating a strong junior section that worked around facts and not on assumptions or best guesses of future need. In other words planning processes had to change to develop short (1yr) medium (3yr) and long term (5yr) strategies that would help the junior section to become an integral part of the membership sharing the same values to provide opportunity for friendship, personal development and enjoyment whilst extending into the club's culture to protect the future health of the golf club.

The club adopted the ethos "Strategic planning is worthless -- unless there is first a strategic vision." which led to the creation of a twenty eight page blue print plan to provide vision and direction for the junior section. There was also a realisation that the junior section was back in the embryonic stage of life cycle development. The club turned towards the integrated GolfMark and Clubmark award to provide a constructive framework to shape new policy and procedures in the full knowledge that both awards had received full accreditation at a national level to bring consistency in the development work.

The process flow-chart, audit matrix and supporting material supplied by the EGU/EWGA Regional Development Officer certainly helped the transitional process providing clear guidance on how to proceed. Within a relatively short period of time the club had compiled sufficient evidence against all the test areas to demonstrate compliance.

Since the award the transformation within the club has been tremendous. There is now a wide range of competitive formats to help the juniors develop and understand the competitive nature of golf with the junior handicapping scheme facilitating open access to the course. Affordable group lessons have helped to improve and retain skill levels making the juniors more successful.

Comments from parents of junior members have been positive now that they have the peace of mind that the needs of their children are being thoroughly considered and addressed within a safe and well organised environment with the knowledge that the golf club has their child's best interest at heart.

The GolfMark and Clubmark development work will continue and it is hoped that in the very near future weaknesses identified by the blue print development plan (practice ground facilities and junior accommodation) will be tackled.

David Ellery - Junior Organiser