industry news
Burgled balls beset Tassie range
Henry Peters
In March, the The Royal and Ancient
Golf Club of St Andrews announced that
they will be voting on a motion to admit
women as members.
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@hsspeters
A
driving range near Hobart has fallen
victim to a major theft of its golf balls
for the second time this year.
A spokesperson said, “The Club’s
committees are strongly in favour of the
rule change and are asking members to
support it. The vote is scheduled to take
place in September of this year.”
Close to 6,000 golf balls were stolen from
Golf Park Hobart on Cranston Parade in
Cambridge on Friday May 31 and taken away
in bright-coloured plastic tubs.
As a separate entity from the R&A,
The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St
Andrews remains a private golf club with
a world-wide membership of 2,400.
Police suspect at least two people were
involved in the burglary before lifting the
containers over a 2.5 metre-high fence and
loading them into a car parked beside the
Tasman Highway.
“I don’t know why people think they can
just help themselves to other people’s
property,” says range owner Dianne Reynolds.
“There’s resale value for golf balls, so I guess
if they advertise them and sell them, that’s
a good night’s work for them. It’s very
annoying, very frustrating and just disruptive
to everything.”
No CCTV vision of the theft was captured
and it has forced Reynolds to install a new
security system at the range, which she says
will ensure almost the entire facility is under
surveillance. “We’ve put in more cameras and
more censor lights.”
Close to 6,000 second-hand golf balls
were stolen earlier this year in a separate
robbery. “They’re old balls that are too warn
to use on the driving range. What we do is
we spray them pink and we use them for
school groups. A few months ago, there was
a number of those that disappeared but that
doesn’t impact on our daily earnings.”
Reynolds – who has managed the driving
R&A to (finally)
allow women?
However, it’s understood Muirfield,
Sandwich and Troon golf clubs
will continue to have a male-only
membership.
range for more than 18 months with her
husband David – admits that the facility’s
relatively isolated location has left it
vulnerable to burglaries.
“We are in the middle of a paddock so I
guess it makes it an easy target even though
we have really high fences and our gate’s
padlocked and chained and they have barbwire across them. They still have to make
a fairly big effort to get in here but it is
secluded.”
Reynolds says business has been allowed to
operate as normal since the golf ball theft in
late May due to a reserve stock of golf balls
that were stored at the range.
At any given time, Cambridge’s Golf Park
has an estimated 7,000 balls on the driving
range and close to 3,000 in storage.
“It would have had a huge impact had I
not had a spare supply of balls to put out. If
I hadn’t have had those, I would have closed
the business because