It has been eight weeks since our June/July edition arrived in clubs and retailers across the region, so there’s a lot to catch up on.
It has been incredibly busy at club level right up to the international and professional levels – particularly for female golfers from our region.
Maggie Whitehead has become one of the most recognisable golfers from the North East this season following her performance in the Rose Ladies Series at The Berkshire in May in front of the Sky Sports cameras. I got the chance to catch up with her on a brief visit home and it was fascinating to hear how much she’s enjoying her golf and competing at the national level. Following that interview, she won the biggest event of her career to-date, the English Girls U16 Open Championship at Morecambe, which meant a quick re-write to finish the interview you’ll find on pages 24-27.
Maggie isn’t the only female golfer to feature in these pages. Whitley Bay’s Rosie Belsham helped England win the European Ladies’ Team Championship, while Durham’s Shannon O’Dwyer and Cumbria’s Nicola Wood lifted their respective county championship trophies. Durham captain Chris Pascall has accepted the nomination to become the next president of England Golf, and we’ve also had County Match Week at Alnmouth and the Northern Counties Junior Jamboree at Wynyard, plus we’ve enjoyed A Round With PGA professional Sally Hinton.
We returned to Close House to play the Filly Course in this edition’s Course Profile, plus we have a lot of results to catch up on from this year’s Match Play Pairs tournament, which has reached the quarter-final stage.
It was fun to spend some time this month researching the impact Dr Alister MacKenzie had on the region’s golf courses and you can explore some of the courses he had a hand in on pages 28-33 as well as finding details on paying them a visit this summer.
Our columnists have been busy too and we have an update from Chris Paisley in Tour Life, some great advice from European Tour caddy Chris Simmons in Tour Tips, and a top tip from Doug Brolls.
The two-month period between editions has allowed us to cram a lot of golf into these pages and there’s a lot more than I can cover here. Enjoy reading this edition and be sure to sign up to the Northern Golfer Weekly emails for even more golf from across the region. Visit linktr.ee/negolfer for more information.
