The Red Deer Golf and Country Club are celebrating 100 years this season.
The course anniversary date is set on March 21, 1922, after the assets from Red Deer’s first golf course were transferred over after it was disbanded.
Chair of the 100th-anniversary committee Lynn Booth explained throughout the year they will be commemorating the special occasion in various ways.
He explained this anniversary is very special for the city.
“The interesting part for all of us on the committee has been how little information there was available to us about the history and of course, 100 years is a long time so we had to go digging for documentation and I must say we got a lot of information from the Advocate archives,” Booth said.
Two major projects for the anniversary he said are they installed what they call the founders’ clock at the course and they will also be unveiling a commemorative plaque on Canada Day.
During the week of Canada Day, they’ve organized special events at the golf course starting on July 1. On July 2 there will be a family junior golf day where they will entertain children at various locations on the course. The next day, which is the anniversary of the establishment of the very first golf club in Red Deer, they will hold a gala in the evening for members and guests at Westerner Park. During that event, they will be unveiling another major project which is a film outlining the history of the Red Deer Golf and Country Club. On Wednesday, July 6 there will be a business luncheon meeting with guest speakers from the Alberta treasury branch updating members on economic conditions in the province. Both the gala and the luncheon will be ticketed events with the proceeds going to the 100th-anniversary centennial scholarship program.
The next day on Thursday there will be a Maple Leaf Junior Golf Tour tournament and in the afternoon another tournament for club members where you can only play with three clubs.
“We chose to kind of consolidate things in one week to kind of ramp everything up for everybody and get everybody excited and I think we’re getting there,” he said.
And finally, from Sept. 5 to 9 they’re hosting the Canadian Senior Men’s Championship which will be a marquee event for the anniversary.
Booth added throughout the last 100 years the golf course has gone through transformations in terms of changing holes. It originally opened with just nine holes and the routing of the course was quite a bit different as we see the front nine today. The additional back nine holes were added approximately in the late 1930s and they also changed over the years.
“For instance holes 16 and 17 were back-to-back par threes at the time. now 16 is a long par five and 17 is a par three. We’ve added land a couple of times in order to evolve the golf course,” he said. “It has changed significantly over time but it’s been on the same piece of land for the entire 100 years which is different than some clubs that have been in existence for 100 years but they’ve moved the actual golf course to different locations as their community grew.”