IAIN ROSS

Congratulations to our Lighthouse Board chairman, Iain Ross, who has been nominated for a major volunteer award for his work with the Junior section of Inverness Golf Club. The picture above sums up Iain well. He is always up for getting involved and helping. Here he is doing a bbq for the street pastors last August. Here is the citation which covers the impact of his leadership:

Inverness Golf Club came on board with ClubGolf in 2008 to coach and make even better players of the 130 members it already had.
Volunteer Iain Ross, Junior Convenor at the time and now ClubGolf co-ordinator, has been responsible for restructuring the club’s junior coaching.
Year-on-year he has helped increase the numbers of coaches to eight at Level 1 and two at Level 1 advanced, offering a programme delivering coaching to every club junior regardless of age, gender or ability. He has recruited female coaches specifically to encourage girls to play. As a direct result girls make up 20 percent of the junior coaching numbers, a huge increase from two years ago.
Iain has contributed up to five hours a week over four years, spread between planning, coordinating and hands on coaching.
“Iain has invested a huge amount of time to lead the development and implementation of our junior coaching programme, especially for our younger, beginner members,” said the club’s Secretary Manager, former Scottish international, Ewan Forbes
“He has made a huge difference to our junior coaching; since he started it in 2008, our junior ClubGolf coaching has grown from next to nothing to over 60 youngsters.”
Ewan and the club’s four professionals play an integral and essential part in the ClubGolf programme, becoming increasingly involved as the volunteer coaches deliver more youngsters to the standard where they need professional coaching.
The whole coaching team encourages juniors to play more often, improve their handicaps and performances and stay in the club membership, an effort which they seeing paying dividends over next few years.
Working with Ewan, Iain has persuaded the committee to install 18 forward junior tees, an innovation has seen a huge increase in the number of juniors playing golf with parents outside the normal coaching times.
This, coupled with having over 60 young juniors regularly using the club which has helped make the club atmosphere even more vibrant.
A further incentive for Inverness juniors is the opportunity to play for the club team in a Ryder Cup style competition against their counterparts from Swedish club, Rya. Such were the bonds formed for the inaugural event hosted they hosted in 2010, that last year the Inverness juniors made the return trip. They won and were delighted to receive the trophy from ex-Celtic legend Henrik Larsson.

The awards cermony takes place in Glasgow this Friday evening.