Highwoods Golf Club wins women’s golf award

Highwoods Golf Club in East Sussex and Wenvoe Castle Golf Club in the Vale of Glamorgan are two of the winners at the first Women in Golf Awards.

Jacqueline Watson Stanford from Highwoods Golf Club

Highwoods, which is managed by Rebecca Prout and has had a female chair for the last five years, was named venue of the year, while Lucy Sellick, the head greenkeeper at Wenvoe Castle, won a trailblazer award.

Emma Booth from Winchester Golf Academy

The East Sussex club, which is a signatory to The R&A’s Women in Golf Charter, also invested its England Golf Covid funding on promoting its golf academy membership to women and subsidising free golf lessons for women. The club currently has over 100 female members, of whom 60 play every week.

Sellick, meanwhile, has talked about being one of the very few head greenkeepers at a UK golf club in recent years.

Other winners included The R&A Women’s Leadership Development Programme and Project Ukraine for ‘women’s initiative’, Emma Booth at Winchester Golf Academy for ‘unsung hero’, Vicky Cuming, the vice president of Golf at The IMG Group for ‘inspirational achievement’ and Surprizeshop for ‘brand of the year’.

Awards co-founders Ben Blackburn and Nicole Wheatley

The awards took place at The Bramshaw and Bell Inn in the New Forest.

The R&A Women’s Leadership Development Programme and Project Ukraine

“This has been a phenomenal evening,” said co-founder Nicole Wheatley. “I feel quite overwhelmed by the response from the room and thoroughly inspired by the people I have met tonight. Our winners are all excelling in their respective areas of the industry, but most significantly every award winner we have heard from tonight is committed to making golf better for the women who play the sport, or the women who have chosen golf as a career.”

Surprizeshop

Winner Vicky Cuming added: “I’ve never really been aware of barriers but I would say that when I started I couldn’t have sat in a room full of women working in the industry – so we have made some progress! It’s a great time for women’s golf and for women’s sport and I feel that all of us have a responsibility that golf keeps up with those other sports.

Vicky Cuming

“Let’s make sure this becomes an annual event. It’s so important for us to keep supporting each other. What a brilliant group of women we all are, so let’s keep doing what we’re doing!”