11 minute read
Hallamshire’s James Glover shows us round 54 Howard Craft on waiting lists and reversed 9s
The interview... JAMES GLOVER
Hallamshire’s general manager looks back at a storied career and gives us a glimpse of the transformation under way at the renowned Yorkshire club
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Golf club managers have a saying, and James Glover is no different in employing it: the moment you stand still you go backwards. There’s hardly been time to draw breath since he arrived at Hallamshire just over three and a half years ago.
Planning is at fever pitch for the Sheffield club’s 125th anniversary next year and a clubhouse refurbishment project has transformed under his stewardship.
He has taken the frantic pace in his stride but, given his history in the game, that’s no surprise. James spent nine years at the prestigious Queenwood Golf Club, in Surrey, where members expect – and pay for – the highest standards of service. He has worked hard to transfer the skills he learned in that environment to Hallamshire.
We caught up with him to learn about his career path and the exciting plans in store for the club over the next few years…
Tell us about Hallamshire… It’s arguably recognised as the premier golf club in the city area of Sheffield and we’re 125 years old next year so it’s an exciting time.
We’re a strong golf course. We’re 1,000 feet up, so it presents a challenge with the wind and the elements.
You’ve got to be able to control and flight your ball well around here. There are fairly small greens and it’s got a firm and fast nature to it and drains well.
We’re recognised as a Harry Colt design but we’re looking at some exciting things with the golf course going forward and the work we’ve done already has pointed to a very different kind of heritage.
We’ve uncovered a lot more influence from Alister MacKenzie,
from around 1914, and Herbert Fowler as well. There is some serious design heritage in there.
We’re looking at engaging over the next few years in a long-term development plan of the golf course to recognise some of those historic features. Obviously, like many golf clubs, numerous greens committees down the years touch the course. You can see little different styles and we’d like it to be more consistent.
We’re looking at pairing with the right partner to pull that long-term strategy together.
One of the key things is that Sheffield’s a city with a strong sporting heritage anyway and perhaps our place in the golf club hierarchy attracts people to the club. If you are serious about your golf, most people want to play the best courses.
How did you come to arrive here? Like an awful lot of people, I started by wanting to play the game. I decided I was going to follow the PGA route. I worked in the shop at Rotherham Golf Club but wanted to be the best I could so I applied for a summer seasonal position at Royal Portrush, which I was lucky enough to get.
I went over at the beginning of April 2008, did well, saw the summer through and stayed and finished up in November. I had the opportunity to go back the following year but I was looking for a full-time position.
A job came up at Queenwood Golf Club, in Surrey, and perhaps having Portrush on my CV got my foot in the door for an interview there. I had a couple of interviews for that role and was lucky enough to get it.
I went to Surrey as an assistant professional and within about 12 months I had worked my way up to senior assistant. Through evolution, over the best part of nine years, I finished as head professional and arrived at Hallamshire from Queenwood.
Was it a difficult decision to make that move? Queenwood is a luxury club and you’ll have been rubbing shoulders with European Tour players and celebrities? What made you want to become a general manager? It was purely a family decision. Queenwood was great, an unbelievable experience. The people you meet and spend time with – it can be intimidating, it can be mind-blowing; all of those things, but it was exciting as much as anything.
I really enjoyed it and stay in touch with the guys there. It was a brilliant working environment. We had a core of staff that really made it work and got on well. I learned so much there about service and delivering a high-end product.
Obviously money is a massive factor, you can’t get away from that. But you can have all the money you want. It’s about the people and having people pulling together to make everything work. I learned a lot about that side of things there.
At the same time, it was massively demanding on my time. My working week was very long. As a pro, working pretty much every Saturday and Sunday is what you do and you are used to it.
But my life changed. I started there in 2009, I got married in 2011 and we had our daughter in 2013. For the first few years, when she’s a baby, you can make it work a little bit and work around it.
Coming back to Sheffield was just fate. At the time, I was talking with my wife about it possibly being time to do something a little
different and perhaps pursue a route which might add a few more strings to my bow, so to speak. I’d perhaps reached my ceiling at Queenwood as no one filling the roles above me were likely to move on (why would they?) which meant there was nowhere for me to progress within that structure.
So you were head professional at Queenwood, looking for a change in career, and Hallamshire just came up? In the week I was talking about it, I looked at what general manager jobs were available and there was Hallamshire.
That application must have taken some confidence. You obviously understand how a high-end club operates at Queenwood, but you had no experience as a general manager and Hallamshire is renowned in its area… Yes, but the thing I go back to was what I said about how Queenwood worked. To make that operation successful, everyone had to pull together so well. The whole thing was so cohesive that it wasn’t like as a member of the pro team you were totally disconnected from what was going on in
James Glover Graduating from the University of Birmingham, James Glover began his career in golf as assistant professional at Rotherham before spending eight months at Royal Portrush. He then moved to Queenwood, in Surrey – where, in a near nine-year stay, he rose through the ranks to become Head Golf Professional. He joined Hallamshire in January 2018.
the clubhouse and the general running of the club.
There’s a difference, though, between golf operations and what you do day-to-day at Hallamshire. It must have been quite a steep learning curve? Definitely. It continues to be so. I don’t think you ever quite get there if I’m being honest. I was confident based on what Hallamshire were looking for. I have got an understanding of the golf side of things but also the service side. My pitch was around that and people in Sheffield know what Hallamshire is but people outside don’t know it as much.
There was a golf course that was recognised but the off course facilities weren’t particularly working at the same level.
For me, the key thing for any golf club is that member services and clubhouse need to operate at the same level.
There’s no point in having a golf course that’s an eight out of ten and a clubhouse that’s a two, and vice versa. You’ve not got a club.
If your golf course is a six, everything else should be six. If you’re eight, everything else should be.
So the key point of my pitch was to get everything working on a level and then work to up that level.
Which brings us nicely on to what’s happening at Hallamshire right now. There’s a clubhouse refurbishment going on… In areas the clubhouse needed a little bit of help. Some of it was done as I started, so I had nothing to do with the planning of that, but we had a conservatory on the front end of the building, which was which was 25 years old and starting to creak and groan.
When the rain got heavy, there was a little bit of water ingress, and it goes back to what I said earlier – it doesn’t fit with a premier golf club.
You can have a golf course as good as you want but if you come in for a drink afterwards, it starts raining and you start getting wet? That’s not really cutting it.
The bar also required freshening up. It was last refurbished in 2011 and the dining room, frankly, was in a poor state in terms of what you are presenting to people.
What started off as a conservatory project went on to become almost a full ground floor refurbishment.
The club were supportive in backing that initiative and it works in conjunction with a change in our catering operation.
That was another area that wasn’t functioning at the level we wanted but, at the same time, it was very difficult to bring in a quality caterer when we’ve got a dining room that wasn’t up to the job.
You have to make these things work together. We decided we would replace the conservatory with a more permanent structure. We built into the existing fabric of the building, put in a lot of steelwork
Hallamshire One of the best and most challenging courses in the North of England, Hallamshire’s heathland layout provides a stern of golf. Perhaps that’s why it has produced such a rich vein of players including the Fitzpatrick brothers, Matt and Alex, and the Walker Cup player Barclay Brown. Designed largely by Harry Colt, pockets of heather and gorse are combined with some stiff elevation changes and the Sheffield course enjoys a firm place in Top 100 lists.
and a fixed permanent roof.
We’ve then put an entire glass front around the front of the building and the view is uninhibited.
You used to stand in the conservatory and there was a view but the UPVC framework and safety bars inhibited it.
Now we’ve got glass, a minimal aluminium framework there, and the front will have sliding doors with a Juliet balcony. When we’ve got really nice days, we can open those.
All of that fed back into a refurbishment of the bar and the dining room and we’re really excited for it all coming together.
Like many clubs, I imagine you’re coming out of the pandemic in a strong position regarding membership and waiting lists. We’ve talked about the clubhouse development. Is this just the start? You’ve got to keep driving and driving. The moment you stand still you go backwards. We’ve got to keep advancing and that’s what will protect the club in the future: keeping it at the top of the tree.
We’ll do that by presenting the best golf course we can and the best off-course facilities we can and have them all operating at a level that is aspirational for people in the city to want to be here and for visitors to want to come and play here. Do you feel like you’ve landed on your feet? If you look back at your career – Royal Portrush, Queenwood, and Hallamshire – it’s been really good so far… It’s pretty good! I don’t know if I have been lucky and I don’t know where it will end. We’ve got our 125th anniversary next year and when I took up this position the presentation the club asked me to make was ‘Hallamshire at 125 years: Where do you see it being?’ That’s what I did and that will be the time I will probably reassess. Then we’ll see where we’ve got to. Have we achieved those goals we set ourselves? From there, we’ll look at what are we doing to take off.
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