Happy Anniversary

Celtic Manor Resort’s Matt Barnby reports on the recent event celebrating one year since Wales’s first Ryder Cup.

Our recent Ryder Cup Anniversary Challenge was a huge success. The idea of the day was to give visiting golfers an experience that was as close as possible to that of the players during last year’s Ryder Cup. Everyone remembers how amazing that event was. There was some incredible golf with a thrilling conclusion, so we wanted to allow ordinary players to experience some of that excitement.

There were 70 participants. While the teams were split into Europe and the US, the majority were UK-based, so there were quite a lot of Europeans playing on the American team. Even though many of the players weren’t actually representing their home continent, it certainly didn’t harm the atmosphere.

We didn’t stint on the detail. The locker rooms were split into European and US sections, and we flew the flags in the relevant areas to add atmosphere. The teams also ate breakfast in the rooms used by the European and American players during last year’s Cup.

It all went down very well and everyone was cheering before they went out with the usual chants of ‘USA! USA!’ That continued on to the dinner in the evening, where we played back some Ryder Cup footage and announced the winning team. Everybody involved really got into the spirit of things.

As for the Challenge itself, there was a shotgun start out on the Twenty Ten Course where we used a live scoring device called VPAR. It’s a clever bit of kit that allowed all the participants to see how they were doing and how the teams were getting on as they were playing.

Unfortunately anyone hoping for a repeat of the 2010 result was destined to be disappointed. America won the competition pretty comprehensively. From early on it looked like they were going to win and in the end it was quite an easy victory with a score of 12-6.

While we couldn’t replicate the result, I think we did a pretty good job of recapturing the excitement of what many think was the best Ryder Cup ever, at least judging from the feedback we’ve had. We’ve already had a number of requests from this year’s participants saying that if we run an event next year they’d like to be booked in now. There’s been a really positive response, so we are now looking at maybe making it an annual event on the Celtic Manor calendar.

Matt Barnby is Golf Operations Manager at Celtic Manor Resort, Newport.