3 minute read
How Ripon brought new blood into the club
My success story... NEIL RAMSAY
Sponsors of My Success Story
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How do you build a junior team without a junior section? Ripon City general manager Neil Ramsay wrestled with that conundrum, but fi nding the answer has breathed new life into the club
Peter Hixon had a bright idea. He wanted to bring new blood into Ripon City and put together a team of youngsters to take on the rest of the Harrogate & District Union.
But there was a problem. The club didn’t have a junior section.
“It was slightly ambitious,” said club manager Neil Ramsay of his and Hixon’s Eureka moment 18 months ago.
“The position of junior organiser is usually headed up by a parent of a player and they do their term, the player goes off to university or whatever, and suddenly it disappears.
“Historically, the club had some good juniors but, suddenly, there’s an abyss.”
Hixon helped formed a committee, and there was nothing unusual about that, but where the duo’s plans differed from the norm was that Ramsay involved not only the professional team but the rest of the club offi ce as well.
So whenever a junior organiser stepped down in the future, there was always going to be someone to ensure the newly revived section didn’t fall by the wayside once again.
Ramsay explained: “Peter puts in a lot of time and, ultimately, will give it up and someone else will come in.
“But at least if we’ve got the consistency from the offi ce, it’s always going to have legs.
“We are leaving a world of fabulous volunteers. Volunteers have built golf clubs, but do those people exist any more?
“So we have to have more paid people within clubs to do the job.” From nothing, Hixon and Ramsay brought together 16 juniors.
The team was inclusive, with players like Austin Ramsay, who suffers from a disability that causes pain and fatigue in his legs, becoming an integral part.
In a league of 10, Ripon City’s debut campaign among the Harrogate elite brought a midtable fi nish.
They even won a couple of fi xtures to boot.
Most impressively, at barely a month’s notice, the club also staged a Junior Open and welcomed a fi eld of 28 players. They want many more to come this year.
What Ramsay hopes their success will eventually do is shift the emphasis towards bringing more youngsters, the notoriously diffi cult to reach 20 to 30 age category, along with families into Ripon, and he insisted the members are right behind the initiative.
“The biggest driving force in every golf club, every manager I ever speak to, is the senior section,” he said.
“People are retiring and living
The beautiful Tyneside Golf Club is a stiff test of golf
longer but, quite frankly, they are going to die.
“If I then look at the sections, such as 20s to 30s, we’ve got far fewer members in those sections and we’ve got to build them up.
“We’ve just started on a very long journey and I would like us as a club to become more involved within Ripon and the area to provide coaching to every school in the area.
“That’s going to get more people playing the game, and it’s not just the kids.
“It might bring in the parents as well.
“We’ve got to look at family memberships.
“We want new people playing this game.
“We’ve got a lot of ground to make up.
“But there is a drive to bring in juniors.
“Having started this, the reaction of the rest of the club has been fabulous.
“They’re saying it’s great to see juniors playing again.
“We’re so proud. It’s a group and they’re getting together and spurring on each other.”
“We hope to expand the team so we’ve got a bit of competition,” added Hixon, who also hopes the Regional Schools’ Association will come to Ripon later this year. “The team picked itself a bit. We want to get it from six to 10. We’ve not had the problem yet of selecting from a bunch of kids.” Concluded Ramsay: “Then it’s about making Ripon City the place you want to join as a junior.
“We’ve got a lot of coaching planned and we want kids who are not generally members to come along as well.
“We’re very excited about it. It’s growing.”
