Wi-fi offers Brown a City connection

Jul 2 2009 by Tim Taylor, The Journal

GIVEN the complexities of running the modern golf club, should there any longer be such a thing as an honorary secretary? Is a salaried, full-time manager essential?

An interesting word there is modern. If I had £100 for every time I have been asked by a golf club – “wireless connection, what is that ?” – I could pack the wife and myself off for a couple of weeks in Barbados. Well, ok, perhaps Whitley Bay.

“Oh yes, we have wi-fi,” says Chris Brown, the new honorary but switched-on secretary of Durham City, who are giving the courtesy of the course for Monday’s challenge match between the league golfers of the North Durham Union and The Journal Dream Team. “If we did not have, I could not have filled the role of secretary.”

Brown has taken over at a time when City are delighted to be seeing an upturn in visiting parties, no doubt enticed by rates as low as £26 a head to play a picturesque course good enough to have staged the England Girls Championship last year and the men’s Durham County Championship the season before that.

A Northern Counties league match between Durham and Cheshire is on next summer’s fixture list.

When you have spent over £500,000 on refurbishing and extending your clubhouse, all but £100,000 of it on the changing room, bums on seats are the No 1 item on every committee meeting agenda.

City, a club noted for encouraging youngsters and producing champions, cannot afford too many empty places on the course and have enjoyed a good reaction to the introduction this season of a “summer sizzler”, which enables visitors to play after 4.00 at weekends for £20 a round.

A self-employed mortgage broker from Meadowfield, Brown, last year’s captain and the reigning club champion, says: “Yes, it is hard work juggling my job and the club, although it does help that the professional Steve Corbally handles all the golf bookings. I work from home and the fact I am fully online both there and at the club is what makes it possible to combine the two.

“If something crops up on either front which needs handling right away, I know about it right away and I can handle it right away.

“On top of that, of course, many golfers find it invaluable to be fully connected through wi-fi here at the club, if they need to check their laptop before they go on the course and when they come off.

“It is all part of offering a service to members and visitors.”