What strange times we find ourselves in. The typical theme of this article would be to review a busy week of Special Awards, Spring Meeting highlights and Pro-Assistant results; as well as previewing future events and encouraging you all to take an active part in your chapter and section tournament and event programming. Instead, I get to report on the impact of a serious and deadly virus that has many of us confined to our homes and closing our facilities. I’ll be honest, writing this article seems somewhat trivial in the grand scheme of things.
Your section board convened on Monday, March 23rd for the better part of the day to discuss the impacts of our new reality. I want to personally thank each of the board members for taking time to meet on your behalf. We began our meeting with one theme in mind: How can we serve each of you during this difficult time?
The financial impact of this shutdown is significant. Much of our board meeting was spent re-evaluating our 2020 budget and plotting a new course of action. Lengthy discussion was had and hard decisions were made. While we never expected to find ourselves in this situation, we planned for this day. We should all commend past board members for their foresight and sense of financial responsibility.
From a financial perspective, we are very confident we’ve developed a strategy to be in a sound financial position at the end of the year EVEN IF we don’t play a single event in 2020. I know that staff and leadership in each of our five chapters will be doing the same in the coming days.
The section board also took steps to address concerns from our associates in our section. Please click here to read about approved changes to our Associate Mentoring Program (AMP) for 2020.
Your Special Awards Committee initiated discussions on how we are going to acknowledge our 2019 Special Awards recipients in the coming months. We look forward to developing a plan to not only recognize this past year’s winners, but also identify new ways to determine and highlight future winners. Thank you to Howie Pruitt for chairing the committee this past year and I would like to introduce Roger Wallace as he begins his year-long term of chairing the Special Awards Committee.
PGA of America leadership has also been hard at work updating policies and procedures with regards to your membership and those working on their membership. The current MSR cycle has been pushed out a year, PAT qualifying changes were made, updates to our PGA PGM program have been approved, and many more changes are in store. I encourage you all to visit the PGA.org website daily. PGA.org can be a tremendous resource for all of us during these challenging times.
The PGA of America has an excellent central location that you can use to find the latest and most up-to-date information on navigating COVID-19 at your facility. Click on the following link to learn more: https://www.pga.org/coronavirus-resources.
Communication during times of crisis is critical. Our goal is to keep PNWPGA Professionals informed as much as possible. You should expect section-wide emails as new information is available and further decisions are made with regards to our operations.
In closing, we know that a light exists at the end of this tunnel. More importantly, I am confident we will come out stronger on the other side. My hope is that we are playing golf by the Washington Open at Meridian Valley Country Club. If that is the case, I can’t wait to tee it up with many of my fellow professionals.
We are all in this together. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
Sean Fredrickson, PGA