KINDRED SPIRITS

With the 2023-24 rankings not far away, Rob Smith meets up with fellow golf course enthusiasts on the Top 100 assessment panel

- Rob Smith

Following a changing of the guard in the spring of 2021 and the recruitment of a number of new readers to the Golf Monthly Top 100 panel, the process to review every course on the contender list began. The window for visits and reviews this time around ran from July 2021 through to the end of October 2022, a period of 16 months, during which time we returned to every single course being considered for inclusion in the updated rankings.

We have always felt it vital to make our list as fresh and contemporary as possible, and by making sure that we review each and every one of the courses during the cycle, we are using information that is as up to date and complete as possible. A few weeks before the cut-off date, I headed to Southport to meet up with a group of our enthusiastic and dedicated assessors in order to discuss anything and everything related to how we look at golf courses. Happily, this was to coincide with playing two of our wonderful contenders, Wallasey and Hillside. An extra benefit would be presentations by both clubs regarding their recent and ongoing course development work.

There are now approaching 40 readers on the Top 100 panel, and this was to be our first get-together as a group, with the exception of a fledgling day out more than 15 years ago. The idea had been conceived by two of our longstanding panellists, Peter Hurst from Lee Park in Liverpool and Gordon Ross, who is a member at Broadstone in Dorset.