IAGA Quick Hits – 1.23.25
Names Family Foundation lends its support to WA Golf Foundation
A story from WA Golf
The Names Family Foundation, one of the quintessential benefactors of youth sports in the Puget Sound region, is lending its support to the Washington Golf Foundation by granting funds to be used directly for the WA Golf Youth on Course program, which provides access to affordable rounds of golf to youth aged 6-18.
The Youth on Course program is made possible through subsidies from WA Golf and donations to the WA Golf Foundation.
The Names Family Foundation is a founding partner with the Aspen Institute’s Project Play Communities Council in championing the federal “63 X 30” initiative, the goal of which is to help 63 percent of the nation’s youth become more physically active by the year 2030. Members of this council commit to taking action that can get and keep more young people playing sports, recognizing that it is at the local level that public policy is shaped, and true and sustainable change happens.
GGP’s Lewine Mair a golf writing trailblazer
A story from the Global Golf Post
It may not be appreciated quite how strong the tradition of women writing about golf in national newspapers has been in the United Kingdom.
Liz Kahn was the forerunner on the The Daily Telegraph in the 1960s, when she covered men’s professional golf because there was no women’s professional golf. Enid Wilson, who won the British Women’s Amateur championship three times in a row from 1931, wrote about women’s golf on the same paper. Patricia Davies, who was married to the late Dai Davies of The Guardian, wrote for The Times, mainly about women’s golf. Elspeth Burnside was an ever-present freelance contributor at golf events in the days when newspapers printed more golf than they do now. Lauren St John, now an author of popular children’s books, covered golf for The Sunday Times for a decade towards the end of the last millennium.
But the most eminent name and female voice on golf matters in the United Kingdom for years has been that of Lewine Mair, my Global Golf Post colleague who has just been named the 2025 recipient of the PGA of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism, the third GGP contributor to be so honoured after this writer in 2013 and Ron Green Jr. in 2023. Mair is the only woman to have been appointed golf correspondent – not women’s golf correspondent – of a British national newspaper, The Daily Telegraph.
iGolf A Lot: What Simulator Golf Has Taught Us About Time
A story from the Idaho Golf Association
When Kyle Weeks and Nicole Rutledge left the IGA office for lunch last Thursday, they had a big trip planned. First, they stopped for nine holes at Barnbougle Dunes — Tom Doak and Mike Clayton’s Tasmanian masterpiece — where the weather was much kinder than the early-winter inversion that hung over Boise. Then, with a hop, skip and a click, Weeks and Rutledge hustled north for nine more holes at Lofoten Links, the widely photographed but seldom played gem of the Norwegian archipelago.
I was feeling blessed to join them for lunch that day — and even more delighted to be back in the office before 2 p.m. — but part of me was disappointed by TrackMan’s presentation of the famous par-3 second hole at Lofoten. It was a bland Scandinavian summer’s day. Blue sky. Sunshine. The corner of the screen indicated a gentle breeze. But there was no sign of the northern lights that Instagram had promised me.
Still, the afternoon was a welcome reprieve from the encroaching frigidness of Southern Idaho’s non-golf season. And that’s precisely why Weeks and Rutledge are competing in a simulator league this winter. For two long-established green-grass golfers — whose love of the game morphed into a career — the simulator experience is a way to welcome winter without bowing to springtime rust. And it’s a growing part of the industry that may come to inform the future of more traditional outdoor golf options.