Fraser's "Glog" (Golf Blog)

Dear Golfers:

The Vancouver Golf Tour is proud to launch a full schedule of 15 events for 2007, including two 'Major' Pro-am Championships, the BC Match Play and the Vancouver Open Championship.

We are very excited about the direction the tour is taking, having confirmed the following sponsors for 2007:

Paine Edmonds LLP
Haywood Securities Inc.
Odlum Brown
Nickel Heating and Plumbing
BCgolfguide.com
Budget Printing
Club Car
Yoga for Golf
Ocean Wellness

And we will be able to premier these and more of our sponsors who are in the midst of confirming their sponsorships through the media partnerships we have formed below:

Global Television
Vancouver Sun/Province
Van Net Newspapers
Radio Station TBA

Our presence was felt nicely this past weekend down at the Vancouver Golf Show at BC Place Stadium where over 20,000 golfers came through the turnstiles. The response from the public was very positive and we feel there will be some further momentum built from the show.

We are only one month away from our Inaugural Event on Monday, March 19th at Sandpiper Golf Club. Registration is underway and we are expecting a full house for this exciting event! Registration forms can be found on the website and the deadline for entry is Monday, March 12th. See you in a month!!

Regards,

Fraser Mulholland
President
Vancouver Golf Tour

Dear friends,

It has been some time since I've written my latest newsletter. In this one, I will catch you all up on my latest whereabouts in the BC golf scene.

The past four months have absolutely zoomed by with good reason. Along with the usual busy nature of the golf business in both the teaching and playing sense, I have beeen extraordinarily busy with my new role as the Commissioner of the SRIXON TOUR and the newly created VANCOUVER GOLF TOUR.

Let me share some of my most memorable moments in all four 'departments'of my life:

In the teaching side of things at Seymour Creek Golf Center, the staff and myself have been very busy with all of our returning clients as well as newcombers to the game. Our junior camps this year have been extremely successful. Our lead junior instructor Brian Crowe has been taking most of the begginer and intermediate camps the past five years since I joined the Seymour Creek team and has done a great job with all these young golfers. I have been sharing some of the camps with Brian and have focused on both the intermediate level camps as well as our high performance camps. It's truly amazing how quickly some of the young golfers improve and seem to transform from 'newby' to advanced golfers within the week. With is phenomenal play this year (16 tournament wins) Bryn Parry has also had his phone ringing off the hook, as many of the top BC juniors in our area have been flocking to see what is the secret to his success- and with Bryn's help, they are catching on very quickly!

On a personal note, I have been enjoying my role at Seymour Creek as the Director of Instruction and all the students I have had the opportunity to meet. I really do get a sense of pride and pleasure when my students share stories of their improvement in the game. I'd like to share a couple with you if you don't mind.

The first is from a student I just started working with this spring. His handicap when he started with me would have been about 22 and after having a handful of lessons, we did see some remarked improvement in his swing, although he would report at his next lesson, not always showing on the golf course. He took a week's holiday with some friends to Maui and upon his return shared a very special moment from his last round of golf at the Plantation course at Kapalua. The 18th hole at the Plantation is a 600 yard downhill par 5 from the tees he played as you've most likely seen in the opening PGA Tour event of the year, the Mercedes Championships. As he reported, he Banged his best ever drive and a five wood from 260 yards onto the front of the green and sunk his 40 foot putt for the first eagle of his life!! What a thrill for him and for me to hear when he returned from his holiday.

My second and almost unbelievable 'feel good' story this year came from a client who visited me for a 30 minute private lesson. A week after her lesson, I received a thank-you card from her at the golf center. Inside the card read the following: "Hi Fraser, My name is _________ ________. I visited you for a 30 minute lesson last week and wanted to share some special news. Before our lesson, my personal best score was 115. Yesterday afternoon, I played in the Surrey Ladies' group tournament and shot 50 on the front nine and 46 on the back nine. What a fantastic feeling. I can't thank you enough!

Now I know what you're saying. You'll all come out for a 30 minute lesson if I can guarantee shaving 19 shots off your personal best score. My answer to that is I know I can't guarantee it will happen, but I do know that it is possible!! I can't wait to hear the phone ring to see if we can get it to happen for you too!!

As rewarding as it has been in a teaching sense this year, I have had a few of my own great moments in golf(although fewer than the past couple of years). The playing this year has been a roller-coaster of scores and emotions that have been at the lowest of the low and highest of the high. I had a great start to the year winning a couple of Lower Mainland SRIXON TOUR events, lead the BC Assistant Pro Championships after 26 holes only to have the worst stretch of golf in the next five holes lead to as disappointing a finish in my professional career I've ever experienced.

Alot of the inconsistency in the game (especially the last couple of months) has come as a result of the two new positions I took this year, the first being the Commissioner of the Lower Mainland SRIXON PRO TOUR.

As much as it has taken a toll on my own game, the commissioner position has been very fulfilling for me this year, seeing the surge in membership from 34 to 53 and the number of events organized from 8 in 2005 to 15 in 2006! With the incredible help of a couple of amazing guys (Bryn Parry - Assistant Commissioner) and Michael West (Mousepad Publishing -www.mymousepad.com),we managed to run a very organized schedule of events and allow both members and public golfers to follow our schedule, stats and results through our new tour website - www.vancouvergolftour.com.

The second reason the game has bounced up and down so much is from taking time away from the practice tee to develop a new golf tour for the city of Vancouver, appropriately called THE VANCOUVER GOLF TOUR. The idea behind the tour came from years of whining and grovelling from alot of the BC golf professionals that no growth has happened here in Vancouver (or across most of Canada)in the way of the tournament side of things. And I'd have to admit, I was one of those guys joining in on the 'beef sessions'. Well, this spring after chatting to a fellow golf professional, I took the ideas we spoke of that day (and alot that I have thought of for the past 10 years) and put them into action. My goal for this year was to organize one significant championship event this year and attempt to make a difference on the BC Golf Scene. Well, I think it worked (see Aug. 31st blog).

With only 3 months to pull it off, I was dead scared of failure, but with a team of 8 very dedicated committee members pulling all nighters and putting in a combined total of over 700 hours, we hosted the INAUGURAL VANCOUVER GOLF TOUR CHAMPIONSHIP PRO-AM on Aug.31st at Northview Golf Club. A sold out event meant we didn't loose our shirt the first year around, but it did mean a deadly slow round of golf that barely finished in the dark!! We had an amazing amount of talented golfers playing in the tournament, including 36 of Vancouver's best professionals and junior golfers- A very exciting day indeed where we ended up offering the low professional (Jay Balloch) a paid entry down to PGA Tour School for 2007!

Although it came with a couple of gliches, The Inaugural event was instrumental to the development of the tour for future years to come. The first full schedule of the tour comes next year in 2007 where we will invite some of BC's best young junior and amateur golfers to play alongside our best professional golfers head-to-head!

The tour will require alot of funding from both local businesses who want to take part in the tour through hole sponsorships and a corporate team challenge whereby business people can team up throughout the year alonside one of our best professionals/juniors to see who reigns as 'Corporate Champion' of the tour. We are also in the midst of securing a number of more significant sized 'MAJOR' sponsorships from larger companies that want to play a role in the development of the best golfers in our city and province and in exchange get some great exposure for their partnership with the tour.

The latest developments will be featured in my 'GLOG' and I will be posting them here for all interested parties to stay informed of my whereabouts in the BC Golf Scence as well as reporting the progress of the tour itself, its members and any exciting news that comes with sponsors that are taking part.

Please feel free to write or give some feedback regarding the latest news releases. We will be looking for a significant number of people to take part in the tour for it to run successfully, whether its in the form of amateur players in the pro-ams, volunteers helping with scoring and ball spotting or people taking a more active roll on one of the many committees we will need to make things run as professionally as the PGA Tour.

Keeping it in the fairway,

Fraser Mulholland
Commissioner
Vancouver Golf Tour
fraser@vancouvergolftour.com

Dear 2006 VGT Pro-am Championship contestant:

I would like to thank each and every one of you for taking time to participate in Vancouver Golf Tour’s Inaugural Pro-am Championship at Northview. We have posted all the prize winners on our website, including the low gross and net amateur winners that were not calculated Thursday evening. Those who have prizes coming to them can arrange to get prizes delivered to them, or they can pick them up from Seymour Creek Golf Center in North Vancouver. Please refer to my contact details below. We posted the remaining team and individual pro and junior scores for all interested parties to see as well.

Overall, our event was a huge success both for Junior Golf as well as amateur and Professional development. The professionals played for the biggest one-day Pro-am purse ($20,000) in BC this year and our winning professional, Jay Balloch will be enrolled into the PGA Tour Qualifying School courtesy of the tour with this victory! For the juniors, they were exposed to an environment slightly different from their own junior golf tournaments. By seeing firsthand how our best professionals prepared to play as well as seeing how they prepared to execute each shot in the tournament itself, the juniors took home some very valuable experiences they can take to their next tournament. Looking at the scores in the professional and junior categories, the juniors should also recognize that they are not that far behind the professionals!!

An internet television station, Vancouvertv.tv was out at the tournament and has made a video of the event with some great footage of some of our rising stars (and some less known amateur guests). We have posted the video on our website (www.vancouvergolftour.com) for all contestants and interested golfers to see. I think you’ll agree that the video turned out really great! As far as other exposure, the event also got covered by several media outlets--Global TV, Channel M, The Vancouver Sun and Province, CKNW and Team 1040 radio stations and the Surrey Now newspaper. All of which will help our campaign for raising necessary sponsorship dollars to make the 2007 season a huge success. Our thanks go out to all the media who took part in promoting the event and for their continued efforts in heightening the awareness of the Vancouver Golf Tour and its goals.

With all the positive aspects of the tournament came a few shortfalls that we are more than aware of (7 hour round of golf, late dinner, computer/scoring issues, tee positions for contestants). We are taking a lot of care to re-model this event and any other we organize so that everyone will return to any of our 2007 Vancouver Golf Tour events feeling like they’ve had the most fantastic golf experience ever.

The 2007 Vancouver Golf Tour Schedule is being firmed up as we speak. Details on the schedule will be released in the fall with some similar tournament formats to our Inaugural Pro-am (less groups, faster….) and many tournaments that will be ‘Open’ for amateurs, juniors and Professionals to compete in head to head. My hopes are that you all take part in the tour next year in one way or another. We will keep you informed of our progress as we build this new developmental golf tour into the future with a follow up newsletter wrapping up any further details from the event such as our contribution to Junior Golf as well as any other newsworthy press releases the tour has to release!

Sincerest regards,
Fraser Mulholland
Commissioner
Vancouver Golf Tour
fraser@vancouvergolftour.com
www.vancouvergolftour.com
(778) 866-GOLF

Funds Raised Through Cooperative Initiative to Aid VGT
Junior Academy & Scholarship Programming

Read Press Release

Dear friends,

It has been quite some time since I’ve sent out my ‘blog’, so here’s my best attempt at ‘catching up’ with all of you.

It has been great to see so many returning students to the teaching academy this spring as well as all the many newcomers who have come for instruction for their first time this year. I’ve had a lot of fun watching all of your games progress throughout the spring and will continue to do so through the remainder of the summer and fall. The ‘golf helpline’ is down below if for some reason the swing is coming off the tracks.

As I may have mentioned in my last newsletter, I have also taken on a new role as the Commissioner of our Lower Mainland SRIXON Pro Tour. We have managed to receive some great press from the Vancouver Sun and Province as well as with Global TV, which has given the tour some newly found interest for the local golf follower. We have 15 events scheduled throughout the spring and summer months and with six events completed I am lying in 3rd place on our Order of Merit Standings which is being led by my colleague at Seymour Creek, Bryn Parry.

The third thing keeping me busy is the development of a new golf tour called the VANCOUVER GOLF TOUR. I have been hard at work preparing the first Pro- Am Championship Golf Event for the tour which will be held on Thursday, August 31st at the Northview Ridge Golf Course (past site of the PGA Tour’s Air Canada Championship).

This event will be the most premier Pro-am tournament run in BC! The focus of the event is bringing our top juniors, Amateurs and Professionals from BC together in this one day event and crown a champion at the end of the day. The Juniors and amateurs will win an outstanding array of prizes and the champion professional will win a paid trip down to the 2006 PGA Tour qualifying school!

With our standards set very high, we will hope to capture the attention of the Vancouver golfing community and media with the tour’s lofty goals for the future. The Pro-am Championship will be a prelude to what will be in store for the 2007 VANCOUVER GOLF TOUR schedule. The tour will be operated as a developmental golf tour and it’s members will consist of any interested junior golfers, amateur golfers and professional golfers who will compete in a series of ‘Open formatted’ tournaments throughout the year. The idea is to get our top juniors and amateurs competing in and amongst the best professionals in our city and province so they get the feel for what it’s like to play on ‘Championship Sunday’ with these best players. The sooner they are exposed to these experiences, the sooner they will learn how to win with the best local professionals in the tournament field. At the same time we are developing the skills of our younger juniors and amateurs, the tour will also give the local PGA touring professionals a chance to compete for substantial professional purses and make a living locally without the burden of excessive travel costs that are experienced on smaller mini-tours across the country and in the United States.

The short term goal of the tour is to send the Order of Merit Winner of year one down to the PGA Tour qualifying school. In year two, we will send down the top two from the Order of Merit. In year three, the top three will be sent down to the Tour School. In Year four, four will be sent down. And in year five, five will be sent down. Within this same five year period, the Vancouver Golf Tour’s vision is to have five of it’s members graduating to the PGA Tour! By this same fifth year, our plans are to be running a schedule of 25 events across Western Canada that will allow the best young golfers the opportunity to develop their skills in tournament competition and make a significant enough living while they prepare to qualify for the PGA Tour. The ten year goal for the Vancouver Golf Tour is to have a series of Championship events for our top juniors, amateurs and professionals, some of which will parallel the biggest professional tournaments anywhere in the world. Our ultimate goal is to have a higher growth of members on the PGA Tour than any other country within this ten year period.

Our vision for the tour is strong and I feel that we can make a difference in developing more PGA Tour Championship golfers from the Vancouver and BC region. The most immediate goal is to create a huge awareness for the vision of the tour. The Pro-am Championship on Aug.31st has been set-up with this in mind so the media, sponsors and all interested golfers can take part and make a direct impact in the future of our best up and coming juniors, amateurs and professional golfers who will be competing in the tournament.

The final details of the Pro-am will be sent out to all of our golf professionals and top juniors in the province within the week. At that time, I will send out a copy of the Tournament Registration Form and Sponsorship Brochure to all of you so that those of you who are interested in taking part in our vision can either play in the tournament, become a sponsor or both.

I will be in touch very shortly and until then, keep it in the fairway and roll the ball into the back of the cup!

Sincere regards,

Fraser Mulholland
Commissioner
Vancouver Golf Tour
Email: fraser@vancouvergolftour.com
Web: www.vancouvergolftour.com
Ph: (778) 866-4653