Stronger than Ever
SCGA Celebrates Its 125th Anniversary
Spanning the two millennia, three centuries and 13 decades, the Southern California Golf Association (SCGA) has evolved into one of the game’s largest, most innovative and storied golf alliances.
“Some of it is the nature of being in California, a place where things get hatched originally; good, bad or otherwise,” says Kevin Heaney, who concluded a 39-year run with the SCGA in 2023, the last 16 of which he served as executive director. “And then those things sometimes spread across the rest of the country. And I think we’ve always had that mindset as
a golf association.”
Founded in 1899 when five clubs — The Los Angeles CC, Santa Monica CC, Pasadena CC, Redlands CC and the Riverside Polo & GC — convened at the downtown L.A. banking offices of the association’s inaugural secretary and, eventually, its fourth president, Joseph Sartori, the SCGA wasted little time demonstrating its appetite for competition.
The SCGA was founded by five clubs in the office of Joseph Satori, the SCGA’s fourth president
In 1900, the association held its debut SCGA Amateur Championship at the “Covenant Links” of The Los Angeles CC; that same year, the Association also unveiled its inaugural Team Match (now known as Team Play) official interclub duels. Per the former, the Am Championship has proven an historic heavyweight; contested continuously since the tournament’s debut, it counts among the nation’s longest-running golf events. Of note: On the very short list of American tournaments preceding it, the first U.S. Open was played a mere five years prior.
That centennial year, following a trip to the opposite coast, Sartori was quoted as saying: “The growing popularity of golf throughout the country will eventually bring thousands to live in Southern California. We must get ready for them.”
As the domestic golf craze advanced, so, in turn, did the SCGA. On the heels of amateur Francis Ouimet’s underdog triumph at the 1913 U.S. Open and an allied victory in World War I, the “Roaring Twenties” saw the SCGA blossom into 45 member clubs and a membership of 20,000 golfers.
In concert, the decade brought forth an architectural “golden age” of course design, which saw the debut of such tracks as the George C. Thomas and Billy Bell-designed Palos Verdes CC (1924), Ojai CC (1925), Bel-Air CC (1926), Riviera CC (1927) and a fully reimagined redesign of The Los Angeles CC’s North Course.
Taking ample note of the growth, the USGA held its first championship west of the Rockies at Pebble Beach GL in 1929 (the same year the PGA Championship was hosted by Hillcrest CC), before holding the U.S. Women’s Am at LACC a year following.
INTO THE MODERN AGE
As the national party segued into the 1930’s Depression Era and the original golf boom found pause across the union, the SCGA worked diligently to serve a membership that had grown to nearly 60 clubs. Along with endeavoring a turf research program in conjunction with UCLA (which now carries on at UC Riverside), the Association’s agronomy and resource efforts further involved working with state governance to lower watering rates for purposes of irrigation.
While the WWII decade continued to test the game’s solvency across the country, the 1950s saw a growing SoCal talent pool of pro golfers swinging in stardom with a burgeoning Hollywood interest in the game. A golf boom anew was teed-up as professional tournaments became a Southland staple.
Not to be lost in the glare of celebrity, the SCGA kept its focus on the game’s stability, ultimately playing a pivotal role in the communal outreach, member education and eventual overturn of the state’s Proposition 6, which had pummeled courses with taxation to the effect of 100 regional locales being forced to close.
In 1964 the SCGA established an electronic format to calculate handicaps and four years later debuted FORE Magazine (with Bob Hope on the cover) which was first published by Peter Ueberroth, a former Time Magazine Man of the Year and Major League Baseball Commissioner.
Page-turning paved the way for a new age of golf bloom across SoCal, and the SCGA’s membership swelled by way of a merger with the San Diego County Golf Association in 1971.
The SCGA added more members in ’79 with the addition of the groundbreaking affiliate club program, which allowed member clubs to be formed without ties to a specific course or country club. At the close of the decade, the SCGA’s tee sheet had soared to over 80,000 members.
“One of the things I saw as revolutionary was the ability to let people create those affiliate clubs, which weren’t your traditional tried, true, green-grass public or private,” says Heaney. “These clubs were formed because the people had a commonality and the SCGA created a scenario where people could join a club where they were with their friends and colleagues.”
Kevin O’Connor, the Association’s managing director since 2015, came to the SCGA after seven years with the Northern California Golf Association and 16 years with the USGA. O’Connor concurs with his former SCGA colleague, Heaney, in recognizing the diversity and flexibility discovered by allowing for affiliate clubs.
“Very proactive, a national leader in that regard,” says O’Connor.“ By expanding the membership policy, it was a watershed moment, and it really opened the door for people who played golf together — church groups, social gatherings, a work entity — but who had been historically precluded from having member clubs. The SCGA saw something different could be done there, and it’s something that, to this day, the rest of the country still hasn’t caught up with.”
NEW PATHWAYS
Come the 1980s, the SCGA became increasingly synonymous with creativity and proactivity in the national golf space.
“The guy who hired me was not a golfer, but a tennis player,” smiles Heaney. “So, at times, he kind of looked at golf through a different lens. And it meant, because we had a board who really supported us, that we weren’t afraid to try new things, to throw some things against the wall and see what would stick.”
As a boom in new course construction swept the region, a youth movement of access and opportunity emerged by way of the SCGA Junior Golf Foundation, which was founded in ’83 with a mission to serve area youth as a safe, diverse, educational and inclusive space to learn lessons on and off the golf course. As evidence of the Foundation’s growth, today SCGA Junior serves more than 8,000 kids annually, provides $1.4 million in financial assistance and awards more than $200,000 in scholarship funding.
Per the youth of the SCGA, 1994 proved a banner year when Cypress-native Tiger Woods captured the SCGA Amateur Championship at Hacienda GC, the same year he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur, an event where he’d go on to author an unprecedented three-peat.
In 2007, SCGA Junior partnered with Youth on Course to present kids with a multitude of options for $5 golf rounds. Soon thereafter, the SCGA saw both ongoing membership and advocacy outreach enhanced by way of a merger with the Public Links Golf Association (PLGA). Along with creating greater efficiencies and expanded services for golfers in the public sector, the merger brought Craig Kessler, a former attorney and then executive director of PLGA, over to the SCGA as director of governmental affairs at a time where golf’s impact on the Southern California environment was under scrutiny.
Leading what is now the most respected golf-centric outreach efforts by any association in the country, the SCGA has advocated successfully on many issues, including responsible water usage, managing green space, defense of municipal golf courses and government relations.
“Utilizing Craig’s skills and facilitating the idea of an advocacy component on behalf of golfers, it was the first of its kind position in the country,” says O’Connor of Kessler. “It was something that hadn’t been in anybody’s wheelhouse to have that kind of structure within a golf association as an employee. And it fits Craig to a T.”
The SCGA made a deeper commitment to female golf with the launch of the inaugural SoCal Women’s Amateur Championship in partnership with the WSCGA in 2015, as well as the joint effort with the SCPGA to offer the Southern California Junior Amateur Golf Championship (Girls) that same year. Such enthusiasm for the girls’ and women’s game found further fairways when the SCGA unified with the WSCGA in 2017 and provided handicapping and other membership services for all female golfers in the region beginning in 2018.
Entering the 2020s, the SCGA would soon reach the monumental membership mark of 200,000, a number that is proudly populated by the nation’s most diverse array of golfers. The Association largely credits the milestone to its concerted efforts over the past two decades to serve its members with a best-in-class club retention and recruitment program, expanded events that reach golfers of all skill levels and a magazine that has intentionally pivoted to the lifestyle genre to engage a broader audience.
In April of ’24, the SCGA conducted one of six national qualifying sites for the USGA’s annual Adaptive Open and, come the onset of ’25, the association will look to host its first-ever adaptive championship. In addition, the SCGA continues to
offer an elevated array of playing opportunities and member clubs for its growing female base.
At 125 years and counting, it’s safe to say the SCGA is stronger than ever.