2007: PGA leaders deliver State of the Association

PGA President Brian Whitcomb and CEO Joe Steranka met the media last January to discuss a variety of PGA activities and initiatives. Among their topics were the PGA Grand Slam's move and Play Golf America's growth.

JULIUS MASON: Good afternoon, everyone, I'm Julius Mason, the senior director of communications and media relations for the PGA of America, and I'd like to welcome you to the 54th PGA Merchandise Show and the annual PGA of America State of the Association news conference. Sitting at the head table today from Bend, Oregon, the owner of Lost Tracks Golf Club and the president of the PGA of America, Mr. Brian Whitcomb. And from Palm Beach Gardens Florida, the chief executive officer of the PGA of America, Mr. Joe Steranka.

We also have some guests in the audience that I would like to recognize. First, from Ludlow, Vermont where he is the vice president and general manager of the Okemo Valley Golf Club, vice president of the PGA of America, Mr. Jim Remy. From Phoenix, Maryland, where he is the PGA Head Professional at Hillendale Country Club, the secretary of the PGA of America, Mr. Allen Wronowski. And from Kiawah Island, the president of Kiawah Island Golf Resort, PGA of America honorary president, Mr. Roger Warren. We're also joined by a handful of PGA of America board of directors around the room. Also joining us from Reed Expositions, Dennis McDonald, the senior vice president of Reed Expositions. And Ed Several, the PGA Golf Exhibitions vice president and show manager.

Now I'll turn it over to Mr. Brian Whitcomb.

BRIAN WHITCOMB: Thank you, Julius, and welcome everybody to not only this press conference but also to the PGA Merchandise Show 2007 style. We're proud of what's going on here and it's been an exciting couple of days leading up to this first day, and I hope many of you were at the Economic Summit this morning which was outstanding in itself, and you could see the vitality and vibrancy on the floor of what's going on here. It's an exciting time and we're proud to be here.

We're committed to being here and being involved in the show for a long, long time not only for all that's good about the show in providing new opportunities for our PGA members, but also our education seminars and some of the other opportunities and activities that PGA members have the opportunity to take part in.

Next year we're excited to announce that our 2007-2008 Annual Meeting, which is our biggest governance meeting that the PGA has each year, will be held right here at the Orange County Convention Center each year and we're excited about that.

We're certainly excited about the PGA Equipment Forum that many of you were at today and that we need to certainly thank the support of the Srixon Company and TaylorMade as well as the Callaway Golf companies. And throughout the entire three days of the show, there will be more and more presentations being made right there at the equipment forum so we certainly invite all of you to take part in there.

We also have quite a lineup of activities as we have already talked about but also tonight at 5:30 starts our awards presentation, which stars our best and our brightest. It's a wonderful time and we certainly invite all of you to be there to watch our best and our brightest receive their awards. I think most of us all have the understanding and the appreciation for not only are the awards heartwarming to the individuals or groups that may get an award, but they are also very, very motivational and inspirational to all of us that get a chance to watch that.

I know as a PGA member, when I go home after these awards, I go home a better person, a better PGA Professional and want to do better at my job in the workplace. So I hope you get a chance to be there at the awards show, which of course, Jim Huber, we are very proud to have a relationship and I'm proud to call him one of my friends is there to emcee that tonight. It's going to be a lot of fun and I certainly invite all of you to get a chance to go watch that tonight.

Change directions just a little bit and let's go into our calendar of events for 2007. It begins of course with our 68th Senior PGA Championship to be held at The Ocean Course on Kiawah Island Golf Resort on Memorial Day Weekend, May 21-27. And of course the Kiawah Island Ocean Course will be the host site for our 2012 PGA Championship. We're excited about that. I've been there and it's a wonderful venue, and it will be a great chance to promote and highlight our very best senior PGA Professionals.

Moving on, in June of this year we'll be going to the Sunriver Resort out in Sunriver, Oregon, for our 40th National Professional Club Championship. That's an exciting time for me certainly. It's about 20 minutes from where I live, and it's a wonderful part of the country and I can't wait to watch our best club professionals compete for our National Championship right there at the Crosswater Club in Sunriver.

And on from there of course we know that the local qualifiers from there will earn a spot in the PGA Championship and we look forward that for sure.

July 11-14th, our 32nd Westfield Junior PGA Championship. We think it's time that we take a moment to salute the efforts of the Westfield Group that it's done such a magnificent job in helping us to promote this junior golf championship and it's been great for juniors throughout the country. It's also a place for them to showcase their skills and their skills are mighty to be sure.

Ultimately, we will go to the 89th PGA Championship at Southern Hills in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for our PGA Championship, which is Southern Hills is the site of our 1970, 1982 and 1994 PGA Championships.

In September, we'll go onto our PGA Cup Matches at Reynolds Plantation in Greensboro, Georgia, and that of course is where we put the very best of our American PGA club professionals, against the team of Great Britain and Ireland and their club professionals and it's a hotly contested Ryder Cup style event that's a lot of fun and not only is it fun, but you'll see great golf, but you'll also see camaraderie and spirit that spans the ocean, and not dissimilar to what we talked this morning on the global impact of golf. There's a wonderful opportunity to have a cohesion between both sides of the Atlantic in this case.

Most of you may know we have moved our Grand Slam this year, it will be October 15-17. We have moved it to Bermuda. So we're excited about that. We had the opportunity to be on the island to make the announcement and I can assure you that the Island of Bermuda stands ready to host the PGA Grand Slam of Golf, and we're excited about it. And when you see the passion and the excitement that we presented there in Bermuda, it will be heartwarming and it will be an exciting time for us. It's also a time to thank all of the wonderful relationships that we have in Hawaii for the years that we were there at Poipu Bay and the people that helped us do that. It's a wonderful relationship that we have.

That relationship is ongoing and I think it's worth a moment just to know that a lot of our work there at the PGA Grand Slam was not only to highlight and celebrate the major champions, and we did that and certainly carried that to you on television and through the media worldwide, but it's also a chance to help junior golf in the islands of Hawaii. So we are grateful and proud of the fact that we were able to do that, and also we tried to leave behind more opportunity for those, and you can see what happened just a couple of weeks ago on television to one 16 year old young man from Hawaii. So there's always hope and we're so glad to be a small part of that.

Ultimately we have a new event for you which is our PGA McGladrey Team Championship, which will be held in September, our National Championship, and ultimately it will be played at the Pinehurst Resort in Pinehurst, North Carolina. So it's an exciting time for us. It's a new format, best ball format where the host club professional will join their members and ultimately conduct a best ball National Championship. So we are excited about that. So there is our schedule lineup as far as golf activities this year.

Transition to our Play Golf America programs, and we have another record setting year in 2006. The industry certainly recognizes our player development program as being a wonderful opportunity to grow this game of golf. We had more than 935,000 participants and group lessons and a 5.2 million total participants in organized play. That's quite an achievement in what is a very young initiative and it's a collaborative initiative that all of the allied associations are involved with, and certainly from a golf course owners and operators perspective, we're grateful for all of the efforts that have gone on there.

We will continue with our PSA campaigns to drive consumers to www.playgolfamerica.com. Certainly we had help from the PGA TOUR, the Champions Tour, the LPGA and of course the United States Golf Association. They have helped us considerably with regards to giving time during their televised events and other activities to make Play Golf America more visible. So we're excited about it.

I should say let's go onto Play Golf America Days also. In 2006, we had 49 Play Golf America Days that were held in 39 PGA sections and more than 17,000 consumers attended which is more than double from the year before. So Play Golf America Days are vibrant, they will be there in the future. This initiative is being led by M.G. Orender and by Roger Warren, and we're very grateful for the work and efforts that they have done. And we look forward to many more things that they are going to do to bring this call to action to the front. We have also had great response, of course, from our sections and our members, so it is, it's an industry wide initiative, but it's implemented at a club by club or facility by facility attitude and atmosphere. So we're excited about that.

And this year of course we're excited about declaring July our Play Golf America's family golf month. This year we have a family golf month, and it's of course designed to bring families together through the game of golf. It's a wonderful endeavor and we're excited about that.

Of course, many of you might know through the National Golf Course Owners Association and the PGA of America that we have undertaken the initiative of Take Your Daughter To the Course Week; that's being promoted and that's a lot of fun. I had a chance to do it myself last year. It's a heartwarming experience that I wish all of us could take part of. PGA members host a lot of clinics and family play days, and I just assure all of you that the PGA professional stands ready to make those initiatives and to make Play Golf America where it can be vibrant for the golf facilities and for the game of golf in the future.

We are also glad to announce that we have another program called "Bring Your Kids to the Golf Range." It's a new Golf Digest publication and Golf Range Association of America initiative that will be promoted under the Play Golf America umbrella, so there's another opportunity to get people involved in it game. So the whole idea is to bring more people into the game, initiate them into the game, but also retain through the expertise of your PGA professional and all that is good about the game of golf itself, get people to play more often and stay within the game.

Also of course, this year will mark our 10th anniversary of our PGA Free Lesson Month which will once again take place in May. It's an opportunity here to thank our partners, Golf Digest, golf for women, the GOLF CHANNEL and our sweepstakes sponsor, Nike Golf. At this time would I also like to thank Bob Carney, creative services director of the Golf Digest Publications and Jerry Tarde, chairman and editorial director of Golf Digest Publications who was behind the development of PGA Free Lesson Month and has supported it over the years. Not only to those businesses, but those gentlemen, thank you very much for helping us with that.

And last year once again was a record year. We had more than 7,400 PGA members take part in our Free Lesson Month, as well as we had over 147,000 free lessons given. And we all know that striking a golf ball a little better than we did before has to do with your willingness or your desire to play more golf, so we are excited about that. All we are trying to do is get more people to play this game.

We are also happy to announce an alliance with the National Golf Course Owners Association to collect and report on golf facilities rounds played and financial reporting and operating information. The brand will be PGA Performance Trak in cooperation with the NGCOA. We are excited about that. Complimentary research service to support PGA professionals and their employers, and I think from an operator's perspective, I do believe that information is power, and that the more I know about trends and the market analysis, etc., gives me a better opportunity to develop strategic business plans that enhance the vibrancy of the golf facilities. And so really that's the spirit we think what we are doing as far as the data collections.

And I would like to take a moment to recognize Mike Hughes, CEO of the Golf Course Owners Association, as well as its president, Henry Delozier and Jim Hinckley, managing director and CEO. We are working closely in a collaborative effort to develop a central strategy about a focusing on monthly revenue and rounds played data and supporting at the local level.

So that's what we are doing in a nutshell from my side of it. If I can just take a moment before I introduce our CEO, just take a moment to say how much we appreciate this opportunity and your interest in coming here and listening to what we have to say about this game. We hope that our PGA professionals are enhancing your life in and around the game every day. And I know that our staff led by Joe Steranka, our Chief Executive Officer, is tirelessly working not only once again to promote me, a PGA professional and give me opportunities, but to protect and enhance this great game.

So Joe, if you've got some information you would like to give us, we would love to hear from you.

JOE STERANKA: Thank you, Brian, and welcome everyone to this 54th PGA Merchandise Show. It's always a chance to see old friends and meet new friends. We have some of those that we have talked about already today, but I'll call on a couple of those.

The PGA Merchandise Show, once again it's the largest gathering of PGA members from throughout all 50 states here in the U.S. and with 79 countries represented. It's really the meeting place of the entire business of golf worldwide. And we celebrated that this morning and an old friend who is here, Sandy Jones, the CEO of the PGA of Great Britain Ireland, and Max Garske from Australia, and we kind of laid out the economic impact of golf worldwide.

So you're looking at just our three organizations representing 42,000 PGA professionals like our president Brian Whitcomb in total influencing the global economic impact of 90 billion, with a B, dollars. It's a huge statement for the game and the business of golf that not only do we have golf professionals who uphold the game's ideals, but we have some very great business managers and business partners that leverage golf to have a huge economic impact at the local state and federal levels and produce several 100,000 jobs. We estimate it's over 600,000 full and part time jobs exist because of the golf industry not just here in the United States.

I do have a couple of news announcements on the business front for the Association. We are pleased to welcome back the Acushnet Company as sponsor of the 40th PGA Professional National Championship. They have been with us since we came up with a new format for with what we used to call the CPC. It is now the PGA Professional National Championship, and for those of you who know that company and its ideals, they are focused on the PGA member. It never waivers, and so we are pleased to have them continue with the most significant tournament activity. We have over 3,000 PGA professionals who fly in those 41 section championships leading up to the National Championship every year.

It's nice to see Bob Carney here and their support of so many marketing activities as Brian mentioned, came up to Play Golf America, and so we're looking at how we might provide a commercial opportunity for Golf Digest, and they are the newest sponsor of our PGA Retirement Plus Program in which they will be marketed through our 10,000 facilities that employ PGA professionals and hopefully increase the number of subscriptions of Golf Digest and the promotion of Free Lesson Month and the many other things that we do together. So Bob, good to have you here and thank you.

One of those new friends I talked about is Art Smith sitting up front. He's the chief marketing officer of RSM McGladrey. He's an avid golfer himself, and I can tell you that they did a lot of analysis of their investment in the sports marketing and found this new team championship, which replaces the Buick Scramble, the Oldsmobile Scramble, as what will be the largest amateur golf event in this country. So we are pleased we got a chance to make that announcement together at the PGA Championship at Medinah, and I appreciate you bringing your team along and excited to see the number of professionals that are asking about hosting events for this year. So good to have you in the family.

One of the other new areas that we are looking at constantly is the impact that the Internet has on retail in the game and all of the products and services in golf. We received our officers and I received a briefing from Turner Sports, they manage PGA.COM and all of interactive media programs that are done on behalf of PGA professionals. Some of the things they have showed, for example, the PGA Trade In Network which was created by PGA professional Lee Bader (ph) and done in cooperation with eBay, but there were 1,200 facilities that participated in that program last year, and those facilities that took the trade in equipment that translated that into new equipment sales produced a 9,500 lift and hard good sales at rest for those facilities. So for those of us who know about retail and hard goods at rest is good news, so we are proud of that.

We believe that we can produce that same type of marketing value for PGA professionals through golf instruction. So smarter lessons is now a working with PGA interactive to create the PGA.com e calendar with the goal that we now make it more accessible for the golfing public to put in their zip code, find a PGA professional that is available to give them a lesson, actually in effect, online, go into the appointment calendar for that golf professional and book a lesson. That's what you'll continue to see us do with PGA.COM and all of Internet services. We are proud with the 1.2 million unique visitors a month PGA.com. It is a huge Web site in the sports business world. Our goal isn't to produce traffic; it's to produce the retail links for PGA professionals, and we know smarter lessons will help us do that.

This show is certainly something that has great trade value, but I think you've seen in some of the promotions that we've done with the GOLF CHANNEL and our public relations efforts to get the Wall Street Journal and USA Today and New York Times and other general interests in the media to the show and use what happens at this show to whet the retail appetite for those 27 million people that play a round of golf each and every year, and hopefully our Play Golf America will get them to play more rounds of golf.

But we think there's a lot of buzz, a lot of excitement that comes out of the show. And we produce a program with the GOLF CHANNEL. This year we'll produce a one hour special that will air in May, actually the first Saturday in May. Hopefully we'll have our program before the Kentucky Derby, but I'm sure we will, that will feature, Bill Macatee will be the host and feature some of the news and information from the show. Again, just proving how much value this show has on the trade and on the consumer side for the game and for the business of golf.

A compliment to what PGA.COM does on promoting golf instruction online is a new programming agreement we reached with XM Radio so they now do a weekly golf instruction show. They were in force down at our PGA Teaching and Coaching Summit that Callaway sponsored for us to interview PGA Professionals, some of the top teachers.

So you are seeing that golf instruction news and information go out every week on XM Radio. Again, another platform for distributing information on the expertise that PGA members have. So that's it. Certainly a lot going on and appreciate everyone showing up today and our friends from Reed for putting on such a good show. You continue to make us proud in how you fly the PGA flag out in front of this place and inside the building. So we'll take any questions you have.

Q.: You had been talking about putting together a PGA training facility on the West Coast, can you tell us where that stands right now?

JOE STERANKA: The PGA Village out of Coyote Springs is slated to have a soft opening for their first course in the fall of this year, and the clubhouse, Learning Center will open sometime in 2008. It's about an hour north of Las Vegas, and it will give us a western presence that is similar to what we have in Port St. Lucie.

Q.: With respect to the financial benchmarking, can you talk about how you'll educate your members as to why this is important to participate in and what you might do to encourage that participation?

BRIAN WHITCOMB: The Performance Trak was rolled out a year or so ago by our president, Roger Warren. Roger did a fantastic job of spending time educating our members about the value of information and in this case data collection. And so we have some education seminars, we have a lot of electronic communication as well as our directors are charged with going out and talking to our delegates, as well as at our Annual Meeting that we go out and talk about the merits of data collection.

But it shouldn't take a whole lot of sales to do that. All of us basically do that at our golf facilities here, but I believe that what the Performance Trak is trying to do in a collaborative effort is to bring all the data under one as close to one umbrella as we can so that it has credibility and that the universe of information is big enough that it has validity and opportunity for PGA members.

So it's twofold. It's getting the information and rounded up in a fashion that we can have validity and we can go down to more specific types of facilities that will assist the PGA member and the golf operator of how to conduct their business, and then the other opportunity is to continue to reinforce the merits of Performance Trak and there is a lot of those.

JOE STERANKA: I'd just add to it that Roger and Brian and Jim Remy, Alan was not yet on the board as our secretary then, but you know, their opinion was that in our industry, we need to really find a way to work together and eliminate redundancy. You know, somebody is doing something really well, let's not try and reinvent the wheel. As the PGA of America, we had created Performance Trak that was tied into our education program at the same time that the golf course owners association with Golf Datatech, and Tom Steiner who is with them today, had created something for their members and we could have gone down these parallel paths for some period of time.

But it was really the goal to say, okay, how can we meet some of the needs of your members, how can we meet some of the needs of our members and so that we can have the educational benefits and they have the realtime business measurement tools or in some cases, the course valuation tools for the value of their facility, and we found a middle ground that is going to save us time and money and for our respected members, instead of getting two e mails a month saying, can you fill out your round and revenue information, they are getting one.

I think it's examples like that that I know our officers and the staffs of the organizations are committed to because it's going to save this industry time and money.

JULIUS MASON: It's also nice to see European Ryder Cup Tournament Director Richard Hills joining us today from across the pond.

We are also joined by the GOLF CHANNEL's Wayne Becker. Thank you both very much for showing up today.

Brian, I hate to tell you this, when you were talking about the schedule of events, the PGA Cup, Sandy was over there laughing with his "No. 1" finger going up in the air.

JOE STERANKA: The holders of the Cup are sitting over there; Cups I should say.

BRIAN WHITCOMB: We look forward to the day when your trophy case has a little less in it.

JULIUS MASON: Thank you very much for joining us today.