| The CN Canadian Women’s Tour Rocks! |
Page 1 of 2  Californian Courtney Erdman Played In Her First CN Canadian Women's Tour Event And Finished 2nd Out Of 90 Competitors - Photo Courtesy RCGA If you are a golfer who lives in the vicinity of North Vancouver and you missed the first CN Canadian Women’s Tour event of 2009 at the Seymour Golf and Country Club, then you missed a great opportunity to witness some amazing golf by some very talented ladies. I can’t tell you the number of times I said, “Oh my…did you see that shot?!” These ladies rock! Living on the west coast of Canada I haven’t had the opportunity to attend the larger women’s tour events in the US (e.g. FUTURES Tour, Cactus Tour). So, I assumed that all pro tournaments were created equal. Wrong! According to competitors who have played all of the “developmental” tours, the RCGA CN Women’s Tour is in a class by itself. What they lose in purse size (about $50K less per event than the FUTURES Tour), they make up in quality. All of the many players I spoke to last week who had not participated in a Canadian Tour event before walked away with high praise for RCGA, Seymour Golf Course and the especially the people and volunteers working the event. Courtney Erdman, a Big Breaker from California who finished 2nd in a field of 90, had never played a Canadian event before. She had heard great things from friends on the FUTURES Tour who had “discovered Canada” and decided to give it a try. She was not disappointed, “It was awesome! The course was in great shape, and they took good care of us. Everyone was really nice, so it was a lot of fun. The Canadian tour plays some pretty nice courses; on the FUTURES Tour you run into some ‘not so nice’ courses. <grin>” Everyone else I talked to shared Courtney’s enthusiasm for the CN Tour, but one FUTURES Tour player (who wished to remain anonymous ;)) was a bit more open at dinner about the differences between the two tours, “At FUTURES Tour events, the marshals are out to ‘get you’; at CN Canadian Events, the marshals are out to help you.” Her 2 cohorts at the table did not argue. Life on the FUTURES Tour is no cakewalk. When I mentioned the marshal comment to Courtney later, she chuckled, “Yeah, on the FUTURES Tour, they really stress pace of play, which in a way, is good. You really don’t want to follow people who are taking forever to play. But as far as pace of play on the Canadian Tour, I didn’t notice them pushing us at all, which was nice because it was really relaxed out there.”  North Vancouver's Seymour Golf And Country Club Proved To Be A Great Host For The Ladies And The CN Women's Tour Event According to Tracey Balogh, a member at Seymour and co-chair of this year’s tournament, with a resume that includes running many of the Air Canada PGA Tours at Northview shared, “At Seymour, members are on a time clock at 4 hrs and 15 minutes max." "Sunday was like 5:15 because the ladies were using their one practice round to figure out the course. It was a real challenge scheduling 90 practice rounds and a pro am on Sunday, while accommodating members who wanted to play. But in the end, we worked it out.” So what is the secret behind the success of Canada’s developmental tour? Well, according to Tracey, a big part of it is the way RCGA organizes the events and supports the host club and players, “We received a tournament manual from Richmond who hosted the event last year, and that’s what we used as our guideline. They even gave us their volunteer schedule, because in the beginning you don’t know how many people you’re going to need and where they will need to be and at what time." "The more information you can get from the previous club, the better. The RCGA keeps the manual up to date. And so by the time we came on board, they’d already built a manual for Seymour. It was great. Now, we can add our 2 cents at the end for the next club to learn from. RCGA provides just about everything including all the walkie-talkies volunteers use to communicate on course - even the paper and names for the score boards. All we had to do was build the wooden stand to support the scoreboard.” Tracey went on to share that the costs to Seymour were minimal – maybe $2,000. According to Richard Kuypers, Tournament Coordinator for the CN Canadian Women’s Open, the success of these events is a result of two things – the clubs who embrace the event and the tour sponsor CN, “Besides having a good golf course, we look for host clubs whose management and members will rally around the event and make it their own. And that’s exactly what Seymour did. You were there; you saw there was a fair number of people following the last group, and out on the patio for the awards ceremonies; there was a great feel to it. That’s what we look for in a club.” Richard continued, “And of course, behind all of it is CN, who sponsors these events, using the proams to entertain clients and reward employee, while offering the players the opportunity to qualify for the LPGA Canadian Women’s Open through this series of qualifying events.” |
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