Latics Golf Day: Why a Football Club Picking Up Clubs Matters for Wigan Golf

Wigan Athletic put out a photo gallery this week from its Latics Golf Day, and I will be honest, it caught my eye more than most football club news does. Not because I am desperate to see who can hit a seven iron, but because any time a big local name chooses to spend a day on a Wigan golf course, I take it as a small win for the courses the rest of us rely on. You can see the pictures on the club's site here.

What the club actually shared

I want to be straight with you about what this is. It is a gallery, published by Wigan Athletic on 14 October, under the heading Latics Golf Day. It is photos, not a report, so I am not going to pretend I know the scores, the format or who won the longest drive. If you want the detail, go and look at the pictures yourself and draw your own conclusions.

What I can say is what it represents. A professional club with a proper local following has put its name to a day of golf and thought it worth sharing with supporters. That tells me golf is still seen round here as something worth doing together, which is more than you can say for a lot of things these days.

Why I care about this more than the football

I play the courses around Wigan especially at Dean Wood where I'm a member. On this blog I review courses by price per round for exactly that reason. Most of us are not weighing up a five figure joining fee, we are weighing up whether a Saturday morning is worth forty quid and the earache for leaving the house.

So when a club like Latics runs a golf day, I see a few things happening. A course gets a decent block booking and a bit of exposure. Sponsors and local businesses get a reason to spend a day on grass instead of in a meeting room. And a load of people who might not have picked up a club for years get reminded that golf is sat on their doorstep.

That all feeds back into the thing I actually care about, which is these places staying open and staying affordable. Courses do not survive on goodwill. They survive on bookings, on society days, on corporate groups and on casual golfers like me turning up often enough to keep the tills ticking over. Every event that brings fresh faces through the clubhouse door helps.

The bit that worries me

Here is my honest concern, and it is not aimed at Wigan Athletic. Golf days with a big name attached can lift a course for one afternoon and then it goes quiet again. A gallery of smiling faces is lovely, but a course needs those people to come back on a wet Tuesday in February, not just when there is a free lunch and a goodie bag.

So if you were there, or if you saw the photos and felt a flicker of wanting to play again, do something with it. Book a round. Take your lad or your stepdaughter to the driving range. Pay the green fee at a local course instead of driving an hour to somewhere with a famous name. That is how we keep Wigan golf courses alive, not by liking a gallery.

What I would love to see next

I would happily see more of this. More local clubs, businesses and even schools using the courses we have. And from the courses themselves, I would love to see them follow up on days like this with offers that work for ordinary families rather than just the corporate crowd. A twilight rate a dad can afford after the school run does more for the game round here than a hundred photos.

Fair play to Latics for getting out there. Now the rest of us need to do our bit and actually turn up.