The following story was published in the Fall 2023 edition of Northern Ohio Golfer Magazine, recently mailed to all NOGA members. Since a major part of the story is about this website, it is republished below. To read the entirety of the NOGA Magazine Fall issue, see the Digital Edition >.
The Northern Ohio Golf Association has been around since 1917. It was initially founded to run tournaments among its eight private member golf clubs.
Over the century that followed that founding, NOGA has expanded its mission to act as a USGA Allied Golf Association, expanded its geography to include the Toledo metro area, and expanded its focus to help the physically challenged through its charitable arm, The Turn.
Another significant expansion in the organization’s mission came in 2019 when the Board of Directors unanimously adopted a new Code of Regulations that allowed all golfers with a GHIN membership to participate fully in NOGA – private club members and public course players alike.
The results of that decision have been an absolute success.
Since that change, thousands of men and women who typically play public golf courses have signed up for GHIN to join NOGA as a member. Many of those public course players have also registered to compete in one of NOGA’s many Scratch and Net Series Tournaments, with those events conducted at the best private clubs and public courses in the region.
But those thousands of new NOGA members still represent only a sliver of the public course golfers who live and play in Northern Ohio. So, the next logical step is to create and implement a broad new plan to attract even more of those public players. A plan that makes joining NOGA a no-brainer.
How does that happen? By building even further on what’s already been done.
In 2018, just before NOGA was set to launch its new public player initiative, CEO Robb Schulze called me. He wanted to reach out to as many public golfers as possible through the regional golf website I run. At the time, that site was known as Northeast Ohio Golf, later changed to Northern Ohio Golf to match our expanded coverage area more accurately. The website address is northernohio.golf.
Robb knew that our site had been around since 2008 and had grown to reach about 200,000 unique readers yearly. He knew it was the go-to site for the region’s players to find and enter competitive amateur and pro/am tournaments. And he knew it was the best way to keep up with all of the golf news happening in the area: junior golf, high school, top-flight amateur play, professional events, and feature stories, too.
Schulze asked for a plan to allow NOGA to join the site for content distribution and as a sponsor. He wanted the site to spread the word about NOGA’s public player initiative and promote NOGA tournaments to all new public course members who would join.
Of course, I said yes. Personally, I was eager to join NOGA and play in its events, too.
The partnership worked immediately. The site had a new sponsor and a new section of content. Hundreds of public course players joined the new NOHIO.GOLF Club that we set up to offer GHIN. NOGA tournament fields sold out quickly due to all the new players, sometimes only hours after opening for entries.
But even with that obvious success, a few limitations in the arrangement became apparent over time. Only some public players can take a day off from work to play in a weekday NOGA golf tournament. The aforementioned ‘small sliver’ of public GHIN members still needed some focus. And even though the website gained a new sponsor in NOGA, the sponsors of both NOGA and northernohio.golf weren’t benefiting from any cross-marketing between them.
After much discussion over the last three years, a solution to these limitations has been realized: NOGA and the Northern Ohio Golf website will join together for an even greater focus on public golf.
NOGA will assume ownership of the northernohio.golf website and use it as its “news” face. I will remain the site’s editor for the next few years while helping to find and train new content creators who will eventually take over the editorial duties for this semi-old man.
The site will continue to cover all things golf in the region. But with NOGA’s help, the Northern Ohio Golf website will expand its content offerings further and eventually venture into some new video and audio productions.
NOGA will assume the event day operation of the tournaments of the NOHIO.GOLF Series played at public courses on the weekends. For the other existing weekend amateur events and series that want tournament promotions, live scoring, event day operations, editorial game stories, photo creation, etc., we’ll offer those options as a service. We already have several takers on this.
The sponsors of NOGA and the website’s sponsors will have a brand new set of combined marketing opportunities starting in 2024 to reach both public and private players. These new offerings will greatly expand the demographics for advertisers big and small.
NOGA will work more closely with public facility owners, PGA professionals, and general managers to offer some new GHIN handicap options to their players. We’ll also have some new Scratch, Net, and Charity tournament options to discuss with these public course operators.
The goal of this consolidation is to further highlight the incredible wealth of public golf opportunities that exist here in Northern Ohio. We will showcase those riches to an even greater extent while giving public and private players all the fun and competitive tournament opportunities they might ever want.
We will roll out the details for this new arrangement and these new offerings in the next few months. We will share these details with golfers via our websites, social media, and email. We have already started conversations with past sponsors; newly interested sponsors can contact us to learn more.
“The growth that NOGA has achieved over the last eight years is nothing short of remarkable – more than doubling in size and member benefits. This is due, in part, to the tremendous relationships that we have built with the stakeholders around us,” said Robb Schulze, NOGA CEO. “This new venture is no different, and there is no doubt in my mind, that this will only create more relationship building for NOGA in the future. Allen has truly been an asset to NOGA, and myself, and I very much look forward to what the future will bring.”
This new NOGA venture is going to be big. We can’t wait to get started.
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