Please find the April membership newsletter here!

By: Craig Kessler, Special to The Desert Sun

Perception is reality in politics, never more so than when the subject is water.

If the Coachella Valley learned nothing else from the last statewide drought crisis it was this: The facts of the matter didn’t matter much when it came to how Sacramento treated the valley.

Those who live, work, farm and play golf in the valley understand that the desert’s water supply is secured by sources almost entirely separate from the State Water Project and unrelated to seasonal rains and snows. It is secured by an aquifer that is among the richest and deepest in the world, as well as federally guaranteed allocations from the Colorado River.

Unlike many of California’s other groundwater basins, particularly those in the Central Valley and along the Central Coast, the aquifer that sits beneath the Coachella Valley has been managed with long-term sustainability in mind for generations, and it is ahead of the Coachella Valley Water Management Plan’s self-imposed 2020 deadline for stasis.

Of course, none of this prevented the Coachella Valley from being lumped in with the urban water districts that really are dependent upon seasonal rains and the State Water Project when it came time to impose 36 percent cutbacks. And it’s not going to matter with respect to the features of the recent “emergency” that are in the process of being made permanent, nor is it going to matter when the next “emergency” is tolled by the State Water Resources Control Board.

Whether the subject is the details of the Groundwater Management Act, mandatory conservation protocols, or permissible landscape palettes, the order of California’s political day is centralization of authority in Sacramento. It’s not always direct authority. It’s more often the threat of substituting state control for local control when the state determines that the locality has failed to meet the state’s minimum standards as prescribed by separate regulation or legislation.

Thus, it is very much in the interest of everyone who lives, works, farms or plays golf in the valley to prevent that substitution. Complaining about the unfairness of it won’t prevent it. The desert’s fate is inextricably intertwined with the rest of the state, and the rest of the state is in a world of hurt.

As much as we would like to think that it’s the bone dry years that are the exception, the facts say otherwise. It’s the wet winter that’s the exception. So is what we used to call the normal winter.

One credible scientific study after another is revealing that the past 130 years have been among the wettest and most stable in California history. Those same studies are revealing that droughts of 10 and 20 years have been common in the last millennium, and a couple of them have lasted multiple generations.

In short, California has constructed an infrastructure to support 40 million souls and the sixth-largest economy in the world based upon rain and snow expectations that we are now discovering were anything but normative. The fact that this has nothing to do with the Coachella Valley is irrelevant. Coming to terms with that contradiction, unfair though it may be, is going to be key to keeping a measure of local control over water management here in the Coachella Valley.

Craig Kessler is government affairs director for the Southern California Golf Association and the chair of the CVWD Golf and Water Task Force. Email him at CKessler@scga.org.

Please find the February membership newsletter here!

By: Larry Bohannan, The Desert Sun

The way David Curtis sees it, members of the PGA of America have one big job: getting more people to play golf.

“That’s what our job is as a PGA pro, to grow the game,” said Curtis, a teaching pro at Westin Mission Hills Resort and the head coach of the Rancho Mirage High School girls’ golf team. “That’s our No. 1 job. If we can put clubs in girls’ hands, we’ll have jobs in the future.”

The desire to have more junior golfers with golf clubs in their hands was one reason Curtis contacted the Southern California PGA to inquire about the SCPGA Foundation’s Clubs for Youth program. That program puts new sets of clubs in the hands of high school golfers, and the result of Curtis’ inquiry to the program was six new sets of clubs for girls at Rancho Mirage, one set for a girl at Desert Hot Springs High School and six sets of clubs for boys at Desert Hot Springs.

“Any help that we can get for him and his girls, helping to sustain the game, having your own set of clubs is obviously important,” said Matt Gilson, foundation manager for the SCPGA Foundation.

The basis of the program is the foundation gives the clubs to the player, not the school. So the player has his or her own clubs during the off-season to use during play or practice, and then the player graduates, they keep the clubs. The new clubs come with a golf bag and are what is considered in golf a starter’s set. That means rather than a full set of 14 clubs, the set comes with 10 clubs, including a driver, a putter and various irons, woods or hybrids.

The clubs are provided by Wilson Staff, with the program underwritten by supporters like Friends of Golf, DevTo Support Foundation, American Junior Golf Association, Wilshire Country Club, The Donald and Carole Chaiken Foundation, Wadsworth Golf Charities Foundation and the LA84 Foundation.

“Really, when we started in April, we knew the focus was on the girls side of things. The equipment on their side was really poor, and there wasn’t much motivation after the end of the season. For a lot of players, and this is especially true for girls, they are borrowing clubs from their dads or brothers,” Gilson said. “A lot of the clubs don’t fit them, and eventually the girls just have no interest in the game after the season is over.”

Foundation statistics state that 44 percent of high school girls’ golfers either share or borrow equipment to play with in matches.

Curtis knows first-hand the difficulty for some players in getting clubs. Rancho Mirage may have the image of a well-off community with high-end private country clubs, but Curtis points out many of the school’s students come from Cathedral City, Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs. Curtis was searching barrels of old clubs at places like The First Tee of the Coachella Valley in Palm Desert, Goodwill and thrift stores and buying clubs at $3 each to give to his players.

“Last year I saw this Clubs Fore Youth program,” he said. “Since I’m part of the PGA, the SCPGA, I’m an apprentice, I e-mailed Matt and said, ‘Hey, how, can I get some clubs for my girls?’.”

The donation to Rancho Mirage, three to players who are graduating this year and three to players who will return to the program next fall, were among the first sets donated in 2018. Gilson said the foundation donated 188 sets to players at 29 Southern California schools in 2017, but he hopes to donate at least 100 sets in the first two months of 2018. In January alone, the foundation gave clubs not only to the two desert high schools but also to schools from Palmdale to San Diego.

While Curtis was happy to have clubs for his players, he also recognized that Desert Hot Springs was a school that could benefit from the program. Curtis contacted first-year Desert Hot Springs boys coach Robert Jensen.

“David shot me an e-mail in October, letting me know of the program,” Jensen said. “The SCPGA people came out and gave a wonderful speech, talked about the donors, the sponsors they work with and gave the clubs to the kids.”

Having their own clubs might help keep kids at Desert Hot Springs excited beyond the school golf season, said Jensen, a physical education teacher at the school.

“It’s a beautiful program. You know how things are in Desert Hot Springs. It’s very hard to keep kids in sports, especially if they are not as successful as other schools,” Jensen said. “But now we have six boys who are continuously playing because they have their own clubs, although they are well behind the learning curve in learning golf compared to kids at other schools around here.”

Find the article full article here.

Please find the January membership newsletter here!