Club News

From James Bilotta, General Manager: Dear Member, 

Happy New Year & I hope you all had a brilliant Christmas spent with your loved ones.

Firstly, I would just like to say thank you very much to all the members & staff for making me feel so welcomed into the club. I still have plenty more of you all to meet & I look forward getting to know you better over the coming months & years.

I would also like to thank Kevin who was a great servant to the club over many years & became part of the furniture, he’s always welcome back at the club anytime. It’s certainly not going to be easy to follow in his footsteps but I will endeavour to do my best for the club.

December is always a hectic time of year & it wasn’t any different this year. We hosted plenty of Christmas events, lunches & dinners over the month. These included the Captain’s Christmas Dinner, Ladies Christmas Lunch & the Presidents Dinner. All in all, well over 100 members & guests attended the festivities. A huge thank you must go to our Head Chef Colin in the kitchen.

I would also like to welcome Oli Fletcher PGA to Arkley. Please join Oli for his complimentary group session on Saturday 15th January at 11am where you can all meet him, please sign your name on the board by the changing rooms. Oli will be coaching out of both Arkley & Mill Green just up the road.

I wish you all a happy, healthy & wonderful golfing 2022. This promises to be a great year for Arkley!

Course News

From Jason Hatton, Course Manager: I would just like to open with a Happy New Year to you all.

With over 100mm of rain since the last newsletter the course has taken a battering and some of the areas on the course have become so saturated, they have proved to be impassable. As soon as ground conditions become favourable, we will commence with renovating those areas. Temperatures have been unbelievable for this time of year with New Years Eve climbing to a mind boggling 16 degrees Celsius. Whilst that’s great for golf unfortunately not too great for the grass plant as the disease pressure is so high invariably, Fusarium will start to breed on greens, tees and approaches. This year we have kept it to a bare minimum and the greens have held up relatively well.

Just before the Christmas period we applied a feed and a dew suppressant to the greens and approaches this kept them dry over the holiday and helped with the constant threat of Fusarium.

Now we are all back to work our main area of importance is clearing the ditches around the course and unblocking any drains so we can keep the water moving off the course. This is a long and laborious operation with 2.5 miles to clear by hand so we would appreciate your patience.

Most of the leaves have been moved off the course with the odd exception and they will be removed shortly.

As the course is so saturated it is impossible to get any heavy machinery out there so cutting will have to be put on hold until ground conditions are favourable.

Ongoing cutting will be done using hand mowers, this will include greens, tees and approaches.

Finally, after a long search for a fourth member of staff we have our man. His name is Charlie and comes from a ground care background, please give him a warm Arkley welcome. Charlie will prove invaluable to Arkley and with a fourth man this will help us to improve all the surfaces and general upkeep of the course.

Captains’ Update

From Steve Vyse, Club Captain: Happy New Year everyone I hope your Christmas festivities went as planned. Since the last newsletter things are starting to progress within the club. At the end of November Kevin Jarrett hosted his first quiz night since the start of Covid and I’m pleased to announce that the Captain’s table ran out eventual winners, congratulations to Steve, Mary, Kaz, Mark, Neil and our guests Laura & Derek Murphy.

The Lady Captain/Captain & Presidents Christmas events were all reasonably attended although Covid unfortunately had a large say in dropouts. Overall the food was excellent and many thanks to the staff for all their hard work.

Some competition results now and The Texas scramble was won on countback by J Connelly/E Chen/G Souter/J O’Neill with a nett score of 64.7. The Turkey Trot was won by Matt Holland & Neil Bradley with a score of 40 Pts. Steve & Mary Vyse held their first mixed fun-day on Monday 3rd Jan, and 18 participants fought their way around 14 holes carrying 5 clubs and a putter. The hidden pairs winne​rs were Eddie Chen & Tanya Wilson with 49 Pts.
Many congratulations to all the winners.

We have finally received our up-to-date slope ratings which all came into effect on January 1st. These have all been posted on the competition notice board.

Kevin has now moved onto his new position coaching at Chesfield Downs. I would like to thank everyone who donated funds towards his leaving present.

Next month there will be more updates regarding club teams & news regarding my away day.

From Tanya Wilson, Lady Captain: There was some great golf to report this month:

• 23/11/21 A fun comp 2 out of 3 scores. Congratulations to Margaret, Sylvia and Marion with 48 points, a great score.
• 7/12/21 Hamper competition. Winners 1st Lorraine & 2nd Marion. The weather was shocking that day so they didn’t want to suffer too much and it was reduced to a 9 hole comp! Thanks to my vice LC Maggie for sorting out the day.
• 11/12/21 Secret Santa Stableford was won by Kaz Donald, great fun had by the Secret Santa players. Thank you to Kaz & Mary for arranging the Secret Santa competition.

14/12/21 Ladies Christmas fun competition & lunch. 15 golfers played a 9 hole hidden pairs Stableford, luckily the weather held for us! Waiting with anticipation we drew out the hidden pairs after our lunch in front of all the lunch ladies, the scores were very close!

The results as follows:

Trisha & Heidi – 26

Wendy & Michaela – 25

Tanya, Chris & Monica – 25

Julia & Margaret – 24

Max & Kaz 24

Pam& Marion – 23

Sylvia & Catherine – 19

36 ladies signed up for lunch, we were greeted with Gluhwein as we entered the clubhouse (this was Sylvia’s homemade recipe), the table decorations and food was lovely so thank you to the Get Golfing team for their contributions. It was great to hear a lot of chatting and laughing as our ladies all seem to enjoy the mini quiz’s and guess the baby/toddler. We celebrated Sylvia’s low-key 80th Birthday!

Thank you to all the ladies for the raffle donations we raised an amazing £335 for my charity ‘Prostate Cancer’ which I have added to my Just Giving page. To date we have raised over £1000!

Just wanted to say a massive thank you to all the ladies and my fabulous Committee for your continued support. Plus, we’ve definitely been promised a larger Christmas tree next year!

January golf is mainly fun comps however those signed up need to play their round robin comps before the agreed date!

Wishing you all a happy and healthy New Year, happy 2022 golfing!

Community Outreach

From Stu Williams, Community Development Officer: Over the last month the team have been finalising our Partner Charities and Schools for 2022. 

We will be launching the partnerships in January but would like to thank all the Captain’s, of all the sections at each site for their time on this process. They will be working together to raise funds, awareness, share the workload and increase the local impact of their chosen charity. 

We will have 8 local charities to support and are making a commitment for the next three years. We hope this will bring the membership together for a common cause, create some great social interactions throughout the year, and embed the chosen group within the club. 

Get Golfing hopes to enhance the great work our members do in raising valuable funds for local charities by offering support to both the charities and the amazing members and volunteers at our sites. 

Along with Anthony Nolan as our Group Charity we look forward to having a great impact on our local communities and becoming hubs for a wide variety of activities and community groups. 

Christmas Raffle

We have the lucky winners of the Arkley Christmas Raffle here: