Tournament History

Being an Ulsterman and having been inspired by the Causeway Coast Golf Tournament on the north coast of County Antrim, Northern Ireland, I began to consider founding a similar event on the Jurassic Coast of Dorset. I moved to Dorset from Northern Ireland in 1975 and have no idea why it took me so long to see the obvious! I also had a hankering to support Hannah’s Appeal, a charity founded and run by friends of mine from Hayling GC. I set my sights high but, as I found out to my cost, too high.

I began by working out roughly how many golf clubs there are in the UK and Ireland – say 3000. I then calculated roughly the average membership size of each club – say 300. I then acquired a lottery licence which permitted me to sell up to £250,000 worth of lottery tickets.

Here was the deal – buy a ticket at £20. This got you a team of two entry to the draw plus a complimentary ball marker each. The draws were split into six with twelve places available in each draw giving a total of 72. The total number of tickets sold was also divided into six.

This gave odds of getting a team into the tournament at roughly 170-1. Not bad.

The prize was 4 nights B&B accommodation plus three rounds of golf. I needed to sell a minimum of 3000 tickets to make it work – in the event I sold three, even though the tickets were to be sold by the Juniors’ section at each golf club and would have earned 20% of the ticket sales for their club. Sadly, no club was interested. That was in 2009 which is why the ball markers you will see today exist. I bought 6000 to cover the giveaways.

We have a superb event at the moment which I’ll comment on later but that’s not where the money is. We hope to give Hannah’s Appeal more and more as we progress but we’ll never make a fortune. Here’s where the fortune is – Take an average of 3000 clubs with 300 members in each. Sell tickets at £20 each (for a team of 2 – £10 per head). Every team buys a ticket. Money in = £18 million. 10% buy a ticket = £1.8 million. 1% buy a ticket = £180,000. 0.1% buy a ticket = £18000. What an event we could have had!!!

Not to worry, we still have an INCREDIBLE golf tournament, full of fun, laughter and camaraderie. The tournament has a sense of togetherness you know, as if we’re all in it together – which we are of course. The officials, the golfers, the golf clubs, the staff – everyone who is involved, is involved.

I was quite disappointed at the first attempt at founding this great event but reality set in and I can now see how impossible the idea of a prize draw was. However, I still realised that we could run an event in beautiful Dorset so I tried it again using a well-worn formula which works. 2015 and the Open Championship at St Andrews. My co-founder had written to the late Peter Alliss describing what we were attempting. During the BBC coverage he very kindly mentioned us for about 90 seconds or so. The power of TV and radio is breathtaking and so, just after he spoke, my phone started ringing and the hard work began!

Sixty one teams in our first year was scary. Forty five in our second, fifty nine in our third, forty five again in our forth and fully subscribed since 2022 shows a steady rise in popularity and success. With a full field of seventy two teams from nineteen counties of England and a team from near Dublin in Ireland, this little tournament of ours has reached International status! You’ll have a ball with us every June.

John Campbell
Tournament Founder and Director