Jamie Komancheck, a past Philadelphia PGA Section Assistant Golf Professional of the Year, is the PGA head professional at RiverCrest Golf Club and Preserve in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.
Like many private clubs, RiverCrest Golf Club and Preserve has an extensive yearly schedule of tournaments. For the majority of these tournaments, we either provide merchandise or golf shop credit as prizes, which have led to over $50,000 in annual sales just from tournaments. Strong participation in the tournaments is vital to a successful golf operation for many facets. To drive participation, we try to provide a few unique themed events that are a little outside the box. The membership enjoys the casualness and variety of these events, which emphasize fun over competition. One of our most popular events is our Ryder Cup. This event features teams of eight players competing in four nine-hole formats. Each team creatively picks their team’s name and they can be as inappropriate as they want (within reason). We encourage teams to coordinate outfits and they have taken it to the extreme (visualize Elvis costumes, Braveheart outfits with kilts and face paint, French maids, etc.). We help select shirts from catalogs and allow teams to design their own logos to go with their team names.
We sell the event out with 144 members participating every year. Most teams purchase their team shirts from the golf shop, to the tune of nearly 100 shirts sold each year. The event is a riot, but it also brings in around $7,000 in merchandise revenue just from the team outfits. In addition, we have $30 per person allocated to prizes, which brings in another $4,000 in revenue. This one event alone brings in over $10,000 annually to the golf shop, and truly is a one-of-a-kind event that the members absolutely love.