HOTELPLANNER.COM PGA EUROPRO TOUR QUALIFYING SCHOOL ANNOUNCED

Five venues will host First Stage before Final Stage at Frilford Heath

The HotelPlanner.com PGA EuroPro Tour can announce its Qualifying School venues for 2015, which for the first time includes five First Stage courses.

Slaley Hall, Mottram Hall, The Players Club, Burhill Golf Club and Woldingham Golf Club will all host 36-hole First Stage events on Tuesday, March 31 and Wednesday, April 1.

Those successful at First Stage will then head to long-standing Final Stage host Frilford Heath, where they will be joined by exempt players with 18 holes to be played on each the Red and Blue Courses before a cut to the leading 80 players and ties who will play a final round on Blue Course. Final Stage takes place Wednesday, April 8 until Friday, April 10.

All professional golfers and amateurs with a handicap of two or better are able to enter Qualifying School and attempt to earn their playing rights for what is set to be an exciting 2015 on the HotelPlanner.com PGA EuroPro Tour. Entries open on January 5 and more details about how to join the Tour can be found at www.europrotour.com

The HotelPlanner.com PGA EuroPro Tour is Europe’s leading development tour, and the European Tour’s satellite in the UK and Ireland.

The Tour offers direct access to the Challenge Tour through the final Order of Merit, with the top five golfers at the end of the season to be awarded a category on the 2016 Challenge Tour. Players will play for a total prize pool of over £800,000 across the 2015 season.

Providing vital experience of life on tour, players will compete in 15 main events at some of the UK and Ireland’s premier golfing venues, with full details announced on January 5, coinciding with the opening of Qualifying School entries.

The past twelve months have provided yet another stellar year for recent HotelPlanner.com PGA EuroPro Tour members. 2013 Order of Merit winner Oliver Farr secured his European Tour card through the 2014 Challenge Tour Order of Merit while William Harrold, who won two events at the start of the 2014 season on the HotelPlanner.com PGA EuroPro Tour, claimed his first Challenge Tour title.

Eight victories were recorded on the European Tour during the 2014 season by former EuroPro members including maiden wins for Daniel Brooks and Oliver Wilson.

In addition John Parry, Matt Ford, Tom Murray and the 2012 PGA EuroPro Tour Order of Merit winner Paul Maddy all made it through European Tour Qualifying School to earn their right to play on the European Tour in 2015.

For more details about playing on the HotelPlanner.com PGA EuroPro Tour in 2015, visit www.europrotour.com

 

Is Rory McIlroy right to suggest that golf should be speeded up?

Golf, perhaps the only game in which strolling is traditionally encouraged, was the latest sport seen to be in a crisis of tempo. 

 

In 2013 America lost about half a million regular players compared with the previous year. In Britain the number of young people regularly playing the game almost halved between 2010 and 2013. 

The latter fact was put forward as one reason why Rory Mcllroy lost to Lewis Hamilton in the popular vote as sports personality of the year. When Mcllroy was asked about some of this by the BBC he suggested that the fall-off in players was most likely down to speed. “Gone are the days that you could spend five or six hours on a golf course,” he said. “Everything’s so instant now, and everyone doesn’t have as much time as they used to.” His solution, when pressed, was to suggest the need for “some way of speeding the game up … I don’t think they need to alter tournament-play formats”, he said. “It’s the grassroots – definitely not at our level.”

For the same period television viewing figures for golf have risen in Britain, the argument sounds a lot like a contemporary truism: boredom thresholds are plummeting, better hurry the thing up, keep them interested. It is the same argument that led – successfully – to the creation of Twenty20 cricket and, lately, the effort to accelerate tennis with the inaugural International Premier Tennis League – strapline: “break the code” – in which the Indian Aces, led by Roger Federer and Pete Sampras, triumphed over the UAE Royals of Novak Djokovic and Caroline Wozniacki. The tournament, organised by the Indian former player Mahesh Bhupathi, promised “to change the manner in which the world enjoys the sport”, to bring “NBA-style entertainment” to tennis fans. To this end, in a six-player-per-team, five-set format, perceived frustrations such as deuce points and tie breaks were eliminated, along with much in the way of concentration or intensity. There were frequent substitutions and the introduction of “happiness power points” that counted double. A big clock counted down time between serves and quietness (that other perilously dull quality for sporting entrepreneurs) was inevitably outlawed in favour of thumping bass lines and raucous crowd “participation” between points. Some players were being paid more than a million dollars a day to take part; one of them, Federer, called it “a crazy, but fun” event, one likely to become an annual fixture.

Mcllroy may be correct in his belief that one way to increase participation in golf is to make changes to the Royal and Ancient code that would speed the game up – though it is quite hard to imagine what those changes would be beyond pitch and putt or running between strokes – but he is perhaps naive to believe that will have no impact on how the game is played at the highest level. As cricket is still discovering, the qualities that created the Test match game – concentration, stamina and doggedness as well as skill and technique – are often directly opposed to those needed to thrive in the Big Bash.
Would speed golf work? There is no clear evidence to suggest that the modernisation of sports, the breaking of codes, results in greater participation in them. In fact, the converse seems likely.

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