Rules

Rules are important for golf. And for golf clubs.  And for competitions between golf clubs. But rules often don’t cover circumstances that arise. Hence the fascinating, if you’re that way inclined, book “Decisions on the Rules ofGolf”. Hence our current review of our rules. And hence our attempt at the recent AGM of the North Northumberland League to deal with a couple of anomalies.

We have been an important part of the North Northumberland League for a number of years, for example winning it five times in the last decade. The matches themselves are usually good to watch, and we usually have many more supporters than the other side. A couple of years ago the League agreed to add a couple of new teams and to split into two divisions. The benefit of two divisions and more teams was that each team in the top league could play home and away, so reducing any home advantage, and the teams were a bit more evenly matched. The disadvantage was that it split the league. And also that no thought was given to how clubs with two teams should operate in terms of team selection and most importantly whether there should be B teams in the top league.

Theoretically, as there are four clubs with B teams (Magdalene Fields, Goswick, Dunstanburgh and Foxton), you could have a eight team division A with just four clubs particpating; even if there are one or two B teams more matches would be played at just one or two clubs giving some form of advantage; even if there are no tactics employed with team selection there is scope for an advantage for clubs with two clubs. Secondly, the rules did not comfortably deal with what happens when – as happened in 2012 - a club does not get a full team out for a particular match – at the moment, the other club is deemed to win 12 – 0.

Keith Whitfield put a lot of work into drafting a new approach for these issues with the most important suggestion being that a club could not have two teams in the top league – as is the case, for example, in the Ladies County Shield. This was an unemotional year to make that suggestion since Foxton’s B team had been relegated and none of the others had been promoted – although Goswick B nearly made it. Unfortunately although the AGM agreed with our proposals to make scores fairer if a club could not get a full team out they did not agree the changes for B teams.

At least the matter has been discussed but it strikes us as bizarre that the league is willing to see a potential concentration of clubs. Hopefully, having raised the matter this year it’ll come up again and common sense will prevail.

Closer to home, Keith together with Angela Peereboom and Mike Robinson have been preparing an update to our rules. This work has been long promised and is nearly complete: the fact is that it’s not easy to come up with a simple, plain English, set of rules to cover how we operate. There’s a number of topics where more than one approach is perfectly reasonable (eg how long should committee members stay on; should we allow proxy voting; what membership categories should we have and which should have voting and ownership rights; should the Ladies group have a separate committee) but we need to suggest an approach to these and then get members’ agreement. We think there are four levels of rules: the rules that govern how the club operates; by-laws that deal with detailed issues; competition rules that deal with how we run golf matters and local rules that apply on the course; all are being considered in this exercise.

Our intention is to send the draft rules (and by laws) to the national body that provides legal advice to golf clubs for comments and advice to make sure everything is covered properly (it should be: we have taken the EGU’s model rules as a guide) and then to send the draft to members, together with a summary of topics where we’d like members’ views. We’ll probably also hold a forum for those who’d like to discuss them – I suspect it won’t be as packed as the clubhouse development forums but of course it’ll be as interesting, at least to those people who attend. Once we are sure they have general acceptance we’ll present them for approval either at an AGM or an EGM.