“This meeting is about one simple question: Do we, as members and supporters, want Gisborne Park Golf Club to continue into the future?”
Club manager Mike Christophers said it was “a little bit of deja vu”, as the club had been in a similar situation a couple of years ago, when the course had to be reduced to nine holes due to dangerous trees following extensive damage caused by Cyclone Gabrielle.
“We are just trying to get people aware of the governance side of the club,” Christophers said.
“People need to start stepping up because the fatigue is setting in for the committee at the moment.”
Christophers said another crucial element of the club’s future was the financial aspect.
“We’d need a good half a dozen people who are committed to fundraising or grant applications.
“The rising costs of fuel and labour, repair, that is what has been killing us, especially this year.”
Christophers said membership at the club, which has 179 full members, had been declining in recent years.
The issue is not a new one for the club, with a Gisborne Herald story for its 75th anniversary in 2011 noting membership had been decreasing since its heyday.
“It is not a great situation, but it is one we are going to hopefully fight through and help keep Tairāwhiti golf moving, because without two 18-hole clubs, even that would be a bit of a stretch for the region.”
“It is not an individual thing; it is a whole club thing. We are trying to save the whole club,” Gisborne Park Golf Club president Josh Hayes says. Photo / Gisborne Herald
Park club president Josh Hayes said the aim of the meeting was to gauge the interest of current and past club membership.
“It is not an individual thing; it is a whole club thing. We are trying to save the whole club. This is for the club that we love and have put so much time into. But we need help from the whole club. It is not just 10 individuals. The whole club has to buy in.
“The more participation and the more clubs we can have in this area gives us a better case to have NZ Golf reps here in bigger roles in the future and developing that younger generation coming through.”
Notable players through the club’s history include Frances Pere, who represented New Zealand as a junior and senior in her teenage years, and Karen Hay (née Pearce), who has won 22 senior women’s club championship titles and multiple open crowns and represented Hawke’s Bay-Poverty Bay.
In the past, the club has hosted major tournaments like the New Zealand junior women’s championship and the 1977 North Island strokeplay, jointly won by Mike Nicholson and Ted MacDougall.