Swedish golf’s double bogey?

This week has been a week of big announcements in the world of golf, particularly women’s golf. I like big announcements (NOT the Donald Trump variety I may hasten to add), progress, new ideas, people doing something, getting results! However, depending on where you are you’re either jumping for joy after a hole in one or sat with face like you’ve just hit a double bogey. I’m talking about the Ladies European Tour schedule announcement filled with three new tournaments (Spain, Turkey and “somewhere else in southern Europe”) as well as more prize money partly due to the co-sanctioned LPGA and LET AAM Ladies Scottish Open.

It’s great work by the LET Tournament organisers and I’ll be following the action all year, but here in Sweden our beating golf hearts were sliced straight into the bunker as once again we were told by the Swedish Golf Federation that there would be no Ladies Swedish Open on the 2017 LET tour calendar.

In an interview by Svensk Golf, Annika Sörenstam criticizes the SGF for its inability to secure an international women’s golf tournament in Sweden and thinks it’s shameless that there’s a men’s but not a women’s tournament considering the amount of female golf talent we have. I can only concur. Not since the end of the 3 year contract in 2015 for the Helsingborg Open have the SGF been able to secure a new LET event. Last year event owners and organisers Largardére couldn’t secure any sponsorship money from a cash-strapped Skåne County Council for a 2016 event rumoured to be hosted at Barsebäck GC (if rumours are anything to go by and obviously they’re not!).

So I look back across the North Sea to my former UK homeland with a fat, green-eyed monster sat firmly on my shoulder as Scottish Golf, with enough gusto to fill their golfing bagpipes, are piping their way to success with the Ladies Scottish Open and dancing a merry ceilidh with one of their major sponsors, Aberdeen Asset Management, who are supporting them fastidiously at junior and elite levels for both men and women, not to mention their tour sponsoring of Catriona Matthew and recently Beth Allen among others.

Meanwhile here in Sweden Nordea, who I salute for sponsoring the Nordea Tour, as well as the European Tour circuit’s Nordea Masters, puts the break on sponsoring the girls once they reach international level.  The funding dries up quicker than the low tide sands at Skälderviken Bay and Swedish women’s golf is left, well, bunkered.

Sweden is by all accounts a tough crowd. It’s a small market with a small number of women golfers, but on the other hand there are more golfers per capita than, for instance, in the UK. It’s also an expensive country to reach in terms of travel and accommodation, low population (and therefore crowd) density unless you focus on the three main cities, and food isn’t the cheapest either although in all fairness quite a few players stay with host families to keep costs down. However, when we’ve got Nordqvist and Lindberg, newcomers like Madelene Sagström and soon hopefully Julia Roth, as well as Gustafson, Friberg, Koch, Neumann, Alfredsson (now incidently LET Player President) and of course Annika The Great, then I do get rather niggled at the hype surrounding Henrik Stenson and the long-awaited “Stenson Effect” for Swedish golf while the women’s game seemingly disappears into a green-side run-off.

I say seemingly as it’s not the case. The Swedish Golf Federation has done so much over the past years to promote women’s golf especially since the launch of Vision 50/50, an initiative to get more women into the sport and involved at club and board level. I can’t understand why they haven’t succeeded in getting another LET tournament on Swedish soil and two misses in two years is a double bogey too much when Swedes dominate women’s golf on the international stage. It is difficult to get sponsorship in today’s austere economy but there is money out there as the Spaniards, Turks and “other southern European country” have proven. If nothing else then Nordea, a bank, isn’t lacking in shiny new coins and notes but the business case for their sponsorship has to be there. They aren’t a charity.

It’s Solheim Cup year again and Captain Annika is gathering her troops again to win back the cup from Inkster’s “pods”. I hope in time that the SGF can get creative and bring back a LET tournament to these northern shores again so that the Viking golf drums in Stockholm can beat a similar tune to the ones of the Scottish golf bagpipes over in Edinburgh, with solid sponsorship and a tournament ownership strategy to make us the envy of European women’s golf. Either that or I may be forced to start a crowdfunding initiative to scrape together a few Swedish Crowns or take my collection box over to the Ricoh with me this August.