What Happens At A Top 100 Courses Panel Meeting

What Happens At a Top 100 Courses Panel Meeting

At the heart of the Golf Monthly Top 100 and the Golf Monthly Next 100 course rankings are two things. One is a strong and well-documented list of criteria that has remained largely unchanged for almost a decade. The other, is our recently-expanded team of knowledgeable, dedicated and energetic readers who make up the assessment panel. They travel the length and breadth of the UK and Ireland to play and review all of the courses on our Contender list and make sure that every single one is seen in each 2-year cycle.

Following a recruitment campaign last time round, we now have approaching 40 readers on the panel, and earlier this month I headed up to England’s Golf Coast to meet up with roughly half of them on the inaugural panellists’ 2-day get-together. The idea for the meeting was conceived by two long-standing panellists, Peter Hurst who plays at Lee Park in Liverpool, and Gordon Ross who is a member of Broadstone Golf Club. The aim was to spend some time together playing two lovely courses, and exchange some thoughts and experiences on the rankings process at the same time as making new friends. Such is everyone’s appetite, that aided by a friendly discount from the clubs regarding green fees, we all paid our own way.

Our trip began at the end of a wet Sunday morning at the excellent links at Wallasey, one of the best golf courses in Cheshire, just as the rain stopped and the sun started to peer through the grey clouds. With a few plus-ones and some representatives from our hosts, there were roughly 32 playing each round. To inject some friendly competition into proceedings, Peter and Gordon had divided the field into two – North versus South – though any attempts to understand the logic in how this split was made went way over my head! This was to be my first, well overdue game at…