CHRIS LANG; DAN CURRIER
Daniels said he used that experience as the
basis for telling Filipowicz, “The best thing
we can do is figure out a way to raise enough
money to get some scholarship money for
kids that work in golf or are interested in golf.”
The plan Filipowicz and Daniels took to a
VSGA board meeting at Boonsboro Country
Club in Lynchburg as a way for the association
to generate income focused on a round of golf
at participating VSGA member clubs for only
a cart fee. Daniels said the board wasn’t too
enthusiastic, but with the help of past VSGA
presidents Ed Key and Dave Catterton, Filipowicz and Daniels made it happen.
Filipowicz and Daniels sent out a personal mailing (using an insurance business
marketing ploy) to clubs, private and public.
Twenty-five courses, including The Homestead and Wintergreen Resort, participated
in the first VIP Card issue.
“We were pushing scholarships and
more golf and free golf, and it took off
from there,” Daniels said. “Once we started
putting out some scholarships, all the big
hitters came on.”
The VIP Card blossomed and so did the
scholarship program. The clubs made money,
the Foundation generated funding and students benefitted through the scholarships. It
was a win-win situation for everyone.
“What used to amaze me was that people
didn’t realize that it was free money for
them to apply for and benefit from,” says
Jean Nichols, who joined the VSGA staff in
1989 and retired in 2009 as the association’s
director of finance and administration. “I
think it was one of the best programs [the
VSGA] had because we took money from
golf and put it right straight into those who
were going to give back to golf.”
Although the VIP Card and scholarship
programs continue to be successful, each
faces challenges and changes as they evolve
in today’s times.
Sheppard’s goal is to sell more VIP Cards
than the year before, “but that has been a
tough task the last few years as competition
within the marketplace has increased,”
he says. “Developing strategies that will
make the program more attractive to participating clubs and potential cardholders
is an ongoing challenge. Technology has
impacted our model, and we’re trying to
remain relevant in an ever changing space.”
To that end, the VSGA will be launching a
mobile app in 2017 that will make the product more dynamic and provide participating
clubs with the ability to generate additional
offers via push notifications throughout
the year.
vsga.org
“I never thought I’d see
this. I never thought golfers
would be that involved with
the Internet, but they are.
I’m sold on the deal,” says
Daniels, whose son, David,
was responsible for bringing
Mill Quarter up to date.
Daniels also notes, “We still get 5,000 to
6,000 [VIP Card rounds] coming through
my golf club every year.”
Typically, the Scholarship Foundation
receives 85 to 100 applications a year, and
a little more than one third of the students
who applied in 2016 received a scholarship.
The original requirement that scholarship
recipients must attend a Virginia college
or university no longer exists because
“the NCAA said we could not give out
scholarships unless we allowed people going
out of state to receive them,” VSGA-VIP
Scholarship Foundation president Michael
Millen says. “In the long run, it’s probably
a good thing because you might get people
who say my child wants to go to Campbell
or Methodist because they want to go into
the PGM (Professional Golf Management)
program. There are no PGM programs in
Virginia. They have to go out of state but now
they might get a scholarship.”
Millen still likes the idea of promoting
going to school in Virginia. His biggest challenge going forward has to do with funding
the scholarship program.
“The more VIP card users we have, the
more the foundation can give away, but
because of economic times, we’ve got competition so we’ve got to find another income
source,” Millen says.
What Millen would like to do is endow
the program. He says raising $5 million is
the goal.
“Then the scholarship program can go
on forever where you give away some significant money. That’s the long-range plan
where you can get some big donors to write
some big checks,” he says.
There are five named scholarships: the
C. Dan Keffer Award is the Foundation’s
highest honor and goes to the top male
applicant. It is given in memory of the longtime committee chairman and Foundation
president who got the scholarship program
ABOVE LEFT: The 1984 VIP Card and 1986 bag
tag of Dr. Frank Filipowicz, past VSGA president.
ABOVE: Jean Smith, the widow of Richard Smith,
speaks with scholarship recipient David Qin at
VSGA Day at Richmond Country Club in May.
rolling; Spencer-Wilkinson Awards go to
the top female applicants; the David A. King
Award goes to a top scholastic perfo