As the man in charge of golf at the City of Brantford, Ontario’s two municipal courses, Northridge and Arrowdale, Jeff Moore knows very well how important a successful junior program can be to a club’s bottom line.
He prefers, however, to weigh that success not in dollars, but in smiles and high-fives.
“The members here are very supportive of what we do with the juniors but they always say ‘I don’t know how you do it,” says Moore. “I tell them that’s what keeps me sane.
“The smile on the kids’ face when they get the ball airborne for the first time, or they chip one in is worth every minute I put into it.”
Moore began his career in golf as an assistant to Gary Maue at Hamilton G&CC in 1987. He spent two years at York Downs as an associate then spent 13 years as Director of Golf at Oak Gables, three at Flamborough Hills and now nine in charge at the City of Brantford.
And at virtually every stop along the way Moore ran an active, vibrant junior program.
“At Oak Gables it really started to grow because we were really running the show there,” said Moore. “That first year there we had 30 junior members. Within three years we had to cap it at 225 and we had a waiting list.
“There’s not too many golf courses that have waiting lists for junior members.”
At Oak Gables Moore began summer camp programs for kids that have carried on with great success at Northridge in Brantford.
“We run seven weeks beginning the first week of July and we’re sold out in February,” says Moore. “Most of the kids are 6-12 but this year we had a number of four and five-year-olds.
“We have a pitching station, a chipping station, a putting station and I look after the long game. I also have three retired teachers and my son Zach, who is the assistant coach at Wilmington University in Delaware helping.”
Moore said it’s important to him that the kids actually get to play golf so every day in the half hour before twilight rates kick in, when the tee sheet is always slow, the kids go out and play a shortened version of the course.
Partly because of the camps the roster of junior members at Northridge has swollen to 186.
“I was getting frustrated that kids would come out to our clinics but never seemed to be practicing,” said Moore. “So this year I included in their junior membership a free bucket of range balls, any size, per day. That encouraged them to practice; so now they’re out here more often, they’re playing more, and they’re getting better.”
While seeing the kids get better is what’s most important for Moore he says it also hasn’t hurt the club’s real bottom line either since the kids and their parents are spending more on F&B.
While many cities across the country are cutting back on the municipal golf programs that isn’t the case at Brantford where they’ve just begun construction on a new $3.8 million clubhouse at Northridge.
“There are lots of contributing factors here to the city investing in their golf program and I think our junior program is a big part of it,” says Moore.
