The proximity of the Wollongong Golf Club to its city centre, beaches and other large sporting attractions makes it truly unique in Australia. You can watch basketball, rugby league, football, pay your rates or visit one of the dozens of restaurants and cafes without breaking a sweat.
And the transformation of the club and course since 2005 has to be seen to be believed.
But the club is just getting started. There are plans to build more holes along the dunes in the coastline flanking the course as the club implements a master plan that now focuses more heavily on the actual course.
Golf NSW sat down with Adam Giddings (AG), club president in his 14th year, and CEO Leigh Hingston (LH) who has been in his role for 12 years. With the support of their club members and other key stakeholders, Wollongong GC is primed for some exciting changes in the years to come.
Golf NSW sat down with the club’s leaders to hear more.
GNSW: Tell me about the transformation of this golf course over the past 20 years.
LH: We were fortunate we had some land that was essentially swamp land and not well used. A developer partner approached us with an expression of interest and we bartered off land for a brand new clubhouse and money to redevelop some of the holes, which included the taking out of the original 18th hole to facilitate the footprint of the new clubhouse.
Golf is an incredibly important part of our organisation. It’s our core purpose. However, it’s fundamentally supported by the activities of the clubhouse operations. Our accommodation revenue, 20 serviced departments, they all feed into the food and beverage outlets across the other two floors. So yeah, having a really diverse revenue profile supports the continuation of golf for over 128 years at this location.
GNSW: A lot of golf clubs in New South Wales and Victoria have been really battling economically over these last few years. Even though memberships have gone up, the revenues aren’t the same. Does the local community support you here outside of golf?
LH: We’re fortunate to be in the heart of the city, where people get a great catchment of residential living and that really drives utilisation of our clubhouse facilities. A lot of our members are able to walk their golf gear from their apartment along the streets of the city to the course. So it’s a bit of a different vibe to a drive-to course. In 2019 we invested about $6.5 million in the clubhouse refurbishment and that completely turned this organisation on its head in terms of revenues. The local community really embraced it and it’s now an integral part of their social fixture.
GNSW: When you talk about a refurbishment, what changes did you make?
LH: We fitted out the restaurant, expanded the area upstairs and then downstairs. We removed some of the locker rooms to another location and opened up all of the retail space on the ground floor to really connect the golf course and the aesthetic and the visual with the internal activities. Having a close by community that’s not necessarily golf related but are looking for a quality place for food and beverage options. And this bar downstairs, the Tap-In Bar, it’s like a pub vibe. So we’re not a traditional golf club vibe. We do considerably concentrate on golf, but we need alternate sources of revenue. We can’t just keep asking the same old golfers to pay $5 for a coffee every time.
GNSW: You are so close to other main attractions and events like the Illawarra Hawks and WIN Stadium.
LH: The Hawks play at the local stadium, the St George Illawarra Dragons play and then the Wolves play soccer. So we get a lot of pre-game visitation for food and beverage and sometimes if it’s the right time, we’ll get some post-game visitation for food and beverage. So that ability to draw that crowd is key to our alternate source of revenue.
GNSW: In terms of being successful,do you need to build the facility to bring the people for the food first because I’m wondering how they work in terms of their sequence.
AG: You have to have the facilities, you have to have the service, but then you’ve got to maintain the service. And we have had, over time, through waxing and waning quality price points and such we’ve really hit the sweet spot. We’ve got some really clever staff that are really looking at the demographic of who’s coming and putting offers on that fit. There’s different offerings put out to the people all the time.
GNSW: In terms of the course itself, when you’re talking about your numbers, you’ve got your membership base that’s consistent, but how are you finding tourism with the course?
AG: COVID was fantastic in NSW for golf because it was one of the few activities you could do. And our golf visitation increased significantly and we’ve essentially kept it. We’re really, really high in our usage numbers for golf. The really busy metropolitan courses like Moore Park host 60-odd thousand rounds per year. So we’re really, really, really busy. So busy in fact that we’re considering we may need to block some time out for our green staff to actually get some time alone on the course to prepare. For this tournament we closed the course a week early and gave the green staff a full week to prepare it. It looks fantastic.
GNSW: Where are all your members going this week? Are they still having a round?
AG: They’re all working. They’re out on the golf course raking bunkers and filling divots. We’ve got over 100 of our members who have volunteered their whole week to be here from dawn till dusk to help deliver the event.
LH: I think that’s the great thing about sport in Australia. It’s underwritten by volunteers and we’re no different here at the club. Without those volunteers, we’d be completely lost.
GNSW: How do you engage so many members for those type of activities?
LH: A lot of our members have experience running these events. Adam has led and run the volunteer program at the Australian Open for a number of years.
AG: I had 15 to 20 years, ran groups of 80 guys from Wollongong and had four holes at the Australian Open. For two Presidents Cup, we had a hole down at Royal Melbourne. We’ve got some really experienced golf volunteers that love it. They know that it’s going to be a long slog. Six hours out there or eight hours out there on the first and second days. Rain, hail, shine, they’re happy to do it ffor a sausage sandwich and a bottle of water. And a reward game on Monday, which is fantastic.
AG: Our volunteers, green staff and bar staff will get to play the course in the same conditions as the players this week, which is fantastic for the coming Monday.
GNSW: Any exciting changes coming for the course in the years to come? The one thing about this course is that it is a little bit different in the way it’s laid out and where you finish. What have you got in the pipeline for the next 10 years?
LH: The club engaged Michael Henderson, a renowned architect from Victoria, to come and do a master plan for our property. That was completed last year. We took our members through a collaborative consultation process where we invited them to participate in the process. We walked the course with them and the architect.
Overwhelmingly, our membership is supportive of us investing further funds into the golf course to raise the standard. The club’s committed to that. We’ve got a number of strategic projects over the years that we’ve delivered now, but it is time for us to spend money on the golf course. We’re working through some of our land ownership issues with some of our partners, including Sydney Water and Crown Land. And once we finalise those relationships, we’ll be delivering a next stage for the golf course.
GNSW: What does that look like? Is it more holes or a different layout?
LH: Different layout, yes. It fundamentally uses the coastline a lot more, so we will push about 14 of the holes hard up against the coast. At the moment, we only play about four or five across the coastline, so it will be a material change aspect when you get up onto the course. And that’s something that we’ve really worked hard to do.
AG: We’ve tried to get the golf out of the wetland areas and up into the dunes, which we need to take full advantage of. One of our key issues is that when it rains significantly, the course can be almost fully inundated, and that generally lasts a tide or two and it’s gone. But the areas that have been inundated, if you get consistent rain, they stay really boggy for a fair amount of time, so those areas will become wetlands, waste wetlands, if you like.
LH: The members that went on the course walk with Michael, he was here for three or four events, three or four hours at a time. They came back and they’re just wowed by the potential.
GNSW: What message would you have for other golfers around the country that get away on golf trips. Why would we consider coming to Wollongong Golf Club for that trip?
LH: There aren’t many places that you can play golf within 200m of the CBD of a city, a major city, with beaches right next to it. You can come and play and stay, and take your time. You might come and watch the St George Illawarra Dragons. You might come and watch the Illawarra Hawks, who are playing in the grand final here on Sunday.
So Sunday is going to be a buzzing day here at Wollongong Golf Club with the final round of the tournament and the pre-game people coming for food and beverages before the Hawks grand final. So that’s the offer that we have. Plus we’ve got 20 rooms of beautiful accommodation, ocean views, mountain views.
AG: We’ve got a pretty good set up and we’re happy to share with everybody.
GNSW: We’re trying to think, is there another golf course in the country this close to a city centre the size of Wollongong?
AG: Moore Park (Sydney) would be probably the closest I can think of, from my experience. The Wollongong Town Hall is literally 300m away from our clubhouse.
GNSW: Last question, how proud are you to host the Ford Women’s NSW Open again here at this club?
LH: I had the privilege of speaking on Tuesday night at a welcome function at the club and that was the overwhelming feeling. Just incredibly proud. It’s a major event. It’s the largest golf event to be hosted in the Illawarra. It’s well supported by Golf NSW and the NSW State Government and we’re incredibly proud to be hosting this week. So get on down to the club and check out the action if you like. Or even if you are Sydney, come down and visit for the day.
