When the executive directors and the staffs from the CGA and the Colorado Section PGA met last October to determine what programs it made the most sense to team up on, junior golf ended up major priority No. 1.
A year later — after plenty of brainstorming, meetings and work on all sides — the seeds bore fruit on Monday, when it was announced that the CGA and Colorado PGA are joining forces in a major effort to bolster junior golf in the state.
As part of a memorandum of agreement signed by CGA president Phil Lane and Colorado PGA president Leslie Core-Drevecky (pictured) on Monday at the Section’s Fall Membership Meeting at Heritage Eagle Bend Golf Club, a Junior Tour will be created that includes four junior major championships in Colorado.
Three of those events currently exist — the CGA’s Junior Stroke Play and Junior Match Play, and the Colorado PGA Junior Championship — and will be part of the Junior Tour, along with the Tour Championship, though the names will be rebranded.
All the major championships will feature both boys and girls competitions. There will also be plenty of other Junior Tour tournaments, mostly 36-hole events on Mondays and Tuesdays, with those competitions meant for top-level junior players who aspire to play college golf (handicap 8.1 or lower).
In addition, there will be a developmental Junior Series that will help players not yet ready for the Junior Tour to progress with their game.
Staff from the CGA and Colorado PGA will jointly oversee both the Junior Tour and Junior Series.
Another aspect of the collaboration will be the creation of a website that acts as a clearinghouse for all things junior golf-related in Colorado, including but not limited to registration for Junior Tour and Junior Series events; the PGA Junior League; the Colorado PGA Golf in Schools program, which exposes school kids to the game through P.E. classes; the Solich Caddie & Leadership Academy and the Drive, Chip & Putt Championship.
The name for that website as well as the name for the collaborative program in general — and many other details — have yet to be finalized. But with 2016 being the first year for the program, the plan is to have all the details ironed out in time for a Golf Summit that’s scheduled for February.
“With the two organizations and what great things they’ve accomplished, just imagine now becoming one powerhouse where our focus is all going to be about the kids and the families. How can that not be great?” said Eddie Ainsworth (left), executive director of the Colorado PGA. “For me, this is a major day. This is just huge.”
Between the CGA and the Colorado PGA, many pieces that will make up this collaborative effort have been in place, while others will be new. The bottom line is to streamline the junior golf process, fill in the voids, further build the junior golf ranks, and create some new excitement with a series of grand slam events.
“It’s the best practices of two organizations (being joined) and I think they’re really going to be complementary,” said Ed Mate, executive director of the CGA. “We’re basically taking the best of what the PGA has been doing — you’ve seen how much they’ve grown their junior golf programs in the last few years — and the history and the legacy of the CGA and the CJGA, and putting the two together. It’s really exciting.
“It will be better (for junior golfers) because it’ll be cooler. It’s going to be better because the tournamemts are going to feel different. They’re going to feel more like, ‘Wow!’ It’s going to be better for parents because the website is going to be simple to use and easy to navigate and very user-friendly. It’s going to be better top to bottom.”
The CGA plans to revamp the trophies for its oldest junior championships — the Junior Match Play, which dates back to 1951, and the Junior Stroke Play, which began in 1977. But the list of champions for those events, which include such luminaries as Hale Irwin, Mike Reid, Brandt Jobe and Mark Hubbard, will remain a fixture on the re-done trophies.
“The kids are going to want to win the ‘Grand Slam’ (in a calendar year),” noted Mate (left). “How cool will that be?”
Mate likened the impending tweaking of the championship names to what was done for the PGA Tour’s BMW Championship, which for most of its storied history was known as the Western Open.
The Colorado associations are following the lead of Nebraska and Northern California, where PGA Sections and golf associations have joined forces for the betterment of junior golf. For the CGA and CPGA, Monday’s memorandum of agreement has been more than a year in the making.
“We’re just at the beginning of a long journey,” said Mate, who once worked at the Colorado PGA. “(Nebraska and Northern California) are three or four years in, and their feedback is, ‘This is the best thing we’ve ever done.’ It’s not without its challenges. You have two organizations and a lot of people’s fingers in the pie. The thing I probably appreciate more than anything at this stage of my life is, ‘Is it sustainable?’ We’re going to build this to last.”
And beyond the benefits for junior golf, this collaboration marks another area where the CGA and the Colorado PGA have found it makes more sense to work in tandem than separately. Those areas have also included the annual Golf Summit and the upcoming Century of Golf Gala, which will celebrate 2015 marking the 100th “birthday” of the CGA.
“I’ve been saying it since the first day I’ve been in this job: We’ve all got to check our logos at the door and work together,” Ainsworth said. “We can make more things happen. I know Ed’s heart, I know my heart. It’s about junior golf, it’s about making a difference and introducing more people to the game.
“It’s like Ed said, ‘Everybody’s chips are in and we’re going to make this thing work.'”
As part of the changes, the CJGA, which was jointly created in 1984 by the CGA and the Colorado PGA but eventually was overseen exclusively by CGA staff, will go by the wayside, with many of its functions becoming part of what will be essentially a joint operating agreement.
“A lot has changed (since ’84),” Mate said. “Now we’re going back to the spirit of working together.”
