Golf clubs made in Australia!! - Urban Golf Australia ©
- 19NEWS Mag: Who are you?
- Urban Golf Australia: Urban Golf Australia is a loose collective of players around Australia who have been playing on and off for almost ten years. We can get up to 100 people to our events and players join and leave whenever they feel. My name is Chris and I have been with the group since the beginning. I have been working with the golf industry to try and grow the sport around Australia and the world.
- 19NEWS Mag: Is there an idea that your team defends or wishes to promote?
- Urban Golf Australia: Preferring to stay away from traditional sporting concepts and structures Urban Golfing in Australia is more about thinking outside of societal norms and challenging people to think differently about how they see their environment. I was heavily involved in skateboarding when I was younger and the excitement you get from finding a new spot and then being creative about what you can do there is something I love to bring into Urban Golfing.
- 19NEWS Mag: How did you start playing offgolf?
- Urban Golf Australia: Our group started playing golf during university. At the time we had no money to afford to go on courses and would only go to the driving range occasionally to smash some balls. One day we wanted to hit them off the headland into the ocean so we went to the driving range, stole the clubs and a bucket of balls and took them home. To get to the headland we would have to go through a caravan park and we quickly found that hitting the balls over the caravans and around the park was way more fun than simply smashing the hell out of them. We started to get more and more urban with our play and were amazed when we went online and found that this was happening all over the world.
- 19NEWS Mag: What's your 1st offgolf memory?
- Urban Golf Australia: My best remembered offgolf memory was when playing through the streets with some friends in Newcastle. A man came out screaming from one of the nearby houses and we thought there was going to be some action if we couldn't explain quickly that we weren't hooligans. So the guy comes over and he seems really pissed off. We asked him what the problem was and he grabs my mates club and says "look here buddy you've got it all wrong..... you need to keep your head down, bend at the knees." Turns out he was upset that our swings were so bad. He then gave us all a quick golf lesson chipped over a car like a pro and went back inside. I still can't believe it happened.
- 19NEWS Mag: What is the general impression of offgolf in Australia? I saw you have the support of the PGA, that's amazing, how did that come to be?
- Urban Golf Australia: The Australian media have always been very supportive of us and our sport and because of that we have been featured in many local magazines, news and radio shows. In about 2012 I think I noticed there was a conference being held in Dubai by the Australasian Golf industry so I wrote them a letter saying that if they didn't act soon to start recognising alternative golfing as a serious segment of the game then their sport would slowly die as it doesn't have any appeal to the younger generation. The letter ended up being printed in Asian Golf Business magazine and the governing bodies here had no choice but to sit up and take notice of our sport. Later that year we gained the support of Golf Australia which is governs the sport of golf in Australia and have been working with them ever since to grow both Urban Golfing as well as Golf as a whole.
- 19NEWS Mag: Where are the offgolf players in Australia and how many are there?
- Urban Golf Australia: As mentioned earlier our group is a loose affiliation of anywhere up to 50 players that regularly attend events however as we continue to hold events and promote on social media we are finding more and more players around the country. Something I have found is that even among people who have never heard of offgolf most people have a story of playing somewhere other than a course. That can include at work, off headlands or in parks around their neighbourhood. One of our sponsors Coopers Brewery even has built a small 3 hole par 3 course for themselves to play on lunch breaks etc.
- 19NEWS Mag: I know from personal experience the challenges involved in developing an urban golf club. How did yu managed to make it happened?
- Urban Golf Australia: Yes there is a lot of work involved in developing Urban Golf clubs mostly though the problem is the cost of going back and forth with samples etc. We have managed to get this happening through trial and error and by sticking to our guns and committing to the challenge of getting it across the line.
- 19NEWS Mag: What is coming next?
- Urban Golf Australia: Unfortunately we weren't able to get to Amsterdam [for the European Urban Golf Cup] this year but we will be once again holding an event in line with the World Urban Golf Day festival which is now 10 years running. Hopefully we will be in a better position in a few years to take part in the World Urban Golf Cup.