Golf


Gaudet Luce Golf & Leisure


Hats off to Gaudet Luce


Built on little more than barren farmland, a shoestring budget and one man’s unfulfilled hopes of owning an M5 service station, Gaudet Luce Golf Club in Worcestershire has been open for only twenty-two years. But, with all these speedbumps, how can it be that the junior complex has risen to be a fixture on a prestigious amateur golf tour, and ranked in the top three of golfshake.com’s ‘Top 100 Golf Courses in the West Midlands’? Jake Barrow went to find out


T


he Trilby Tour is enjoying its 10th anniversary as one of the biggest and broadest churches in British amateur golf, and Gaudet Luce is the Worcestershire county regional


course of choice for 2017. A day made up of equal parts light-heartedness and fieriness whittled the contenders down to ten. After this, the winners of that event will join those from ten other regional events around the country to compete in the national final at Hull Golf Club on 31st


18 I PC AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2017


August. The best of those 110 golfers will then be crowned the International Trilby Tour Champion. If you feel as though you’ve missed something salient, you haven’t - it’s a mystery to us why it’s labelled as ‘international’ too. Also impressive is their customer-based popularity ranking on Google’s number one golf satisfaction comparator. Number three, and even number two as recently as June, is shockingly high in the overall rankings for West Midlands golf clubs. To put this into


context, the BBC’s best estimate once held that nearly 3% of the surface area of the West Midlands is set aside for golfing. This course alone contains three courses


of varying types. One is a 9-hole course known as ‘The Hadzor’, which hugs a parallel footgolf course hole-by-hole. These are in addition to the pristine parkland 18-hole, ‘The Phoenix’, for which the club is considered so successful. The baby Hadzor course, as well as The Phoenix naturally, has been kitted out with greens finished to USGA specifications and, from there, the club runs its golf academy and programmes to encourage young people to become interested in the sport. The history of the facility is tied to the


nearby National Trust centre at Croome Court, and is fascinating. There is an engraving in the apex of the farmhouse above the front door which contains the words ‘Gaudet Luce’, and the club named itself after this engraving. They discovered that the phrase, meaning


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