Dundonald Links pays the price of fame for the Scottish Open

The Herald Scotland

2 days ago

The world number one will be making her debut at the tournament, which is co-sanctioned by the Ladies European Tour (LET) and the LPGA in the US. Last year's winner is also returning to defend her title.
It comes quick on the heels of final qualifiers for The Open on July 1, with Dundonald Links one of four deciding grounds for the remainder of the men competing at this year's tournament at Royal Portrush later this month. There are compelling reasons to host such events, but cash profit isn't usually one of them.
Read more:
'There's a bit of a misconception with the likes of the women's tour events and the men's tour events when courses like ourselves and many others host a tournament,' says David-Ross Nicol, director of golf at Dundonald Links.
'There's not a financial payment that goes to the club regarding the events, apart from the likes of an Open, whereby the R&A would pay a fee to the course, so we are effectively gifting the golf course over to the tour for the week.'
Rather unusually, Dundonald Links provides all in-house catering for players, officials and the event's corporate sponsors throughout the week. This is charged at cost to IMG, the event management company responsible for organising the tournament, so there's no profit there either.
'Where does Dundonald make money? That's a good question,' says Mr Reekie.
'There's probably a commercial aspect that says we could make more money on our normal operations, but…the balance of it is exposure. It's a really high-profile media event.
Read more:
'This year we've got the world's number one female player, Nelly Korda, which we're really excited about and looking forward to that. Lauren Coughlin won it last year and is returning to Dundonald as well. They're both [US] Solheim Cup players, and we've also got a lot of Ladies European Tour players coming as well.
'So we enjoy a lot of exposure and we get a lot of press on the back of it. It's covered live on Sky Sports to millions of viewers, so it's good for the profile of the course, and I guess the payoff isn't necessarily about pounds and pence initially, it's in profile and getting what we do at Dundonald out there a little bit.'
This is the fourth consecutive year that the Women's Scottish Open has been held at the Ayrshire venue, and the seventh overall. With so much riding on media coverage, the optics are paramount.
Buggies are normally restricted from the long rough at Dundonald Links to protect the area's ground-nesting birds. Hosting the Women's Scottish Open adds a further dimension to the necessity of managing the flow of traffic.
'When you see the golf course on the TV, the cart lines that the buggies would leave in the long grass is then visible from all the aerial footage, so we have to make sure that the guys utilising the buggies on the golf course, from a player point of view and a staff point of view, are actually heading in the right direction and not going into areas that you would see from these camera shots,' Mr Nicol said.
Read more:
The man in charge of making sure the greenkeepers are armed to keep the Kyle Phillips-designed course in top condition is equipment manager Blair Fleming. While the players and spectators are out competing, the workshop will be a hive of activity ensuring the dozens of machines that went out in the early hours of the morning are ready to go the next day.
'Come up to tournament time you're really doing everything you can to make that course as perfect as possible, so about a couple of weeks out from the tournament the golfers are playing the best possible version of the course that it's going to be, which isn't always maintainable the whole year given weather and different things like that that factor into it,' Mr Fleming said.
'It's probably strange for people who are not in the industry or in the business to see what it's like, but yeah, there's a lot that goes on to get to where it needs to be for a tournament coming.'
All of that builds on foundations laid much earlier in the year.
'The prep work really starts right at the beginning of the season in ways that actually become a bit of a science to get the course in the right condition in the lead-up to the event,' Mr Nicol said. 'There is a lot of work that goes on in the background that people really just unfortunately don't quite appreciate.
Read more:
'All these new fertiliser applications come out like a slow release, where you put them out at a certain time of the year and they actually work for a prolonged period of time, rather than you and I who are looking after our front grass and whack a bit of Miracle Gro on now and again.'
Organisers are hoping to pull in as many as 10,000 visitors over the course of the week and with tickets available to purchase on the day, a good run of weather would help achieve that goal. Other improvements, such as changes to car parking arrangements and adjustments to the flow of spectators around the course, have evolved from assessments of previous events.
'We do a review the week after the tournament finishes,' Mr Reekie said. 'We start to look at what worked, what didn't work, what could be better, and we start to materialise those conversations and work out a plan to make it better year on year.
'For me, I joined in December, and really from January onwards we started to get into the detail of it. So the planning is there in the background all year long and it comes to a head…about four to six weeks ahead of the tournament.'