FIRST SHOT
Message from the CSGA Executive Director
O
n behalf of our staff and our many
volunteers, welcome to the The CSGA
Links in 2015. This March issue will be the
first of seven we’ll publish this year, and whether you
are a serious competitor or a casual golfer we hope you
enjoy every one.
It’s been a great winter, right? If you’re a skier
or you make your living with a snowplow it’s been
tremendous, but if you’re a golfer you’re probably just
ready for it to end. All of us at the CSGA are certainly
ready for springtime!
People sometimes ask us, “What do you guys do
in the winter?” They know we stay very busy from April
through October when we’re conducting tournaments
spread throughout Connecticut, and lending support
to other events in New England. Truth is we stay busy
year round, even when there is two feet of snow on the
ground.
As our season is ending, we’re hustling to
complete and then distribute our CSGA Championship
Annual, the 100-page glossy magazine that we produce
entirely in-house. Our goal each year is to produce a high
quality book and have it ready for our Annual Meeting
and Hall of Fame inductions in early December.
At the end of the year we’re also finalizing
contracts for the following season and future year’s
schedules. The typical CSGA calendar brings us and our
tournament players to approximately 50 different golf
courses (49 in 2015) so finalizing those arrangements is
an important and time sensitive process.
November and December is a time for both
review and planning, and we have more meetings
and conferences than at any other time, including a
weeklong gathering with the USGA and fellow golf
administrators from across North America.
From January through March we attend more
meetings and execute a number of projects that wouldn’t
be possible to take on during the playing season. Our
staff members each attend a four-day USGA Rules
Workshop, and we conduct our own Rules of Golf
education for golfers and officials in Connecticut. We’re
now offering Rules education every winter alternating
between the traditional classroom workshop setting,
4 | CSGA Links // March, 2015
and the eightweek online class
we concluded just
last week. We also
produce our CT
Golf PlayBook in
advance of the midMarch Connecticut
Golf Expo, where
we
are
active
participants over a
three-day weekend.
We spend a good bit of time at the State Capitol
tracking legislation that could affect golf course
operations throughout Connecticut, and speaking on
behalf of those operations and other folks in the golf
business. This has been a particularly busy “off-season”
at the Capitol with a variety of issues including taxes,
water, drought management and pesticide use getting a
lot of attention.
In the winter months we review dozens of
resumes and conduct multiple interviews before hiring
our interns for the coming year, and we get a jump
on our fundraising efforts for the CSGA Scholarship
Fund in Honor of Widdy Neale.
And then finally, we always know we’re getting
closer to the end of winter and the start of our “active
season” on April 1 when the volume of phone calls
to our office increases dramatically and we’re helping
a club professional or a handicap chairman prepare
for the start of the season. We like helping the many
callers, and we also like this signal that frigid air and
frozen tundra will soon be replaced by warm sunshine
and green grass.
Yes, it’s been a brutal winter, but we’ve managed
to stay quite busy in our not-so-warm office in Rocky
Hill. The idea is always to hang in there and keep grinding
because before you know it we’ll be back outside, and
instead of handling a snow shovel we’ll be handing out
“Hole Location” and “Notice to Competitor” sheets.
And that’s really the best part of every year.
~ Mike Moraghan, CSGA Executive Director
www.csgalinks.org