New pics of Ridgewood Lakes

New pics of Ridgewood Lakes Golf & Country Club now available (see link below). In the meantime, here's an excerpt from my Golf World article on Undiscovered Florida. Enjoy.

New greens please
Although the course is at the heart of a gated community, the houses are kept a respectful distance from the course, meaning you don’t have to interrupt someone’s barbeque to retrieve your ball should you hit a flyer. Best of all, it’s a genuinely good layout.

“It is more of a precision golf course – very target-orientated, but fair,” says McLoone. “There is a lot of room off the tee; you just need to know where to hit it.” And what distance to hit it - 14 holes have water and many have fairways with unseen inlets that demand accuracy rather than length. The result is a course that requires consideration off the tee and deftness around the greens – not what you would expect from a lakeland course in Florida.

Check out the full article at http://www.todaysgolfer.co.uk/Golf/Magazines/Magazines/Golf-World/

Here's a link to the pics: http://www.markalexanderphotography.co.uk/RidgewoodLakes/

Party on!

Here is an excerpt from a Golf Management Europe article I wrote about making the most of a celebration. Enjoy.

CELEBRATE GOOD TIMES

Special anniversaries offer golf clubs a chance to let their hair down. Mark Alexander finds out how to celebrate in style

Every so often there comes a time when you just have to party. At golf clubs, these special occasions suspend normality and generate fervoured activity driven by specially formed committees. Anniversaries or special centenary dates need to be marked accordingly, and these committees are the ones to make it happen.

The team at Montrose Golf Links certainly did that last year when they invited just about everybody to the east coast of Scotland to celebrate 450 years of golf at the historic Montrose Medal Golf Course. “There simply wasn’t a downside,” says Alan Crow, chairman of Montrose Golf Links Limited. “A lot of people went away with smiles on their faces.”

Montrose is home to the fifth oldest course in the world where play was first recorded in 1562. Last year, the 450th Committee masterminded a series of events to mark this historic date including a re-enactment of the first locally recorded golf shot and a weekend of matches in which 450 golfers were invited to play - in the end, 522 took part.

Montrose’s blockbusting programme also included a junior open, a special exhibition in a local museum and the extension of the 11th hole to 450 yards. It was a year-long pageant of fun, but with all that going on, you might expect the coffers to reeling. Not so, says Crow who praises the input of local sponsors. “We got sponsorship from Glaxosmithkline, the local Rotary Club, the Round Table and individual businesses that wanted to make a contribution to our celebrations. Because of our generous sponsors [GSK contributed £4,000], the net costs to Montrose Golf Links Limited was £700 for the whole year.”


The complete article can be found at http://www.golfmanagementnews.com/gme/current-issue.html

Worth a read

A relatively 'new' title on the market is the relaunched Golf Illustrated, which deals with golf in a slightly different way to other titles. Considered, informed and detailed, the magazine places a lot of emphasis on photography and story telling (rather than providing advice on how to cure your slice).

As you might have guessed, I write and take photographs for the magazine, but don't let that put you off - http://www.golfillustrated.co.uk/