Rancho Santa Fe Golf Club needs the entire Rancho Santa Fe Association’s support for building membership

Since June 30 is the end of the 2012-2013 Rancho Santa Fe Association’s fiscal year and, therefore, the RSF Golf Club’s fiscal year, I am writing this letter to all of the members of the Association to help them become educated on the state of the membership of the Golf Club. As such, here is the letter from the Membership Committee that is being presented at the annual meeting of the Golf Club on Wednesday, June 26, 2013:

MEMBERSHIP COMMITTEE

2012-2013 Annual Report

Steve Dunn, Chairman

Connie Berkley, Judy Roberts, John Snyder, Larry Springer, Scott Johnson, Al Castro

This year has been both exciting and difficult at the same time. The annual budget anticipated the addition of 16 new Regular members or four more than the 12 who joined the preceding fiscal year. I am extremely proud to say that as of this writing we have 21 new members, eight of whom are in a new Junior Executive classification! We commenced the fiscal year with a total of 521 active memberships, and we now have a total of 510 active memberships, or a net

loss

of 11 active memberships. So even with the exceptional efforts of Al Castro, his staff and the hard work of all of the Membership Committee we have still lost ground.

We began the fiscal year by attempting to implement some new, fresh and dynamic changes to the usual membership marketing efforts. The Membership Committee proposed a new category of Junior Executive membership along with a proposed modification to both the Former Resident and Resident Associate categories, taking these categories from 10 years down to five years to qualify. The RSF Golf Club Board of Governors unanimously approved these recommendations which were presented to the Association board in early January 2013. The Association board approved a total of 10 in the new Junior Executive category, but tabled the changes in membership term length in the other two categories until the results of an Association-wide survey could be tabulated. As of this writing this survey still has not been disseminated to the greater Association, so we wait on this modification.

The Junior Executive classification was a very successful addition and, so far, as was mentioned above, this fiscal year has garnered eight new memberships. The Former Resident classification, which still requires a minimum of 10 years of previous membership, has grown to 29 with the addition of 14 new memberships, although many of those came from regular members who have transferred out of the community. Those on Inactive status, who continue to pay the debt service over-ride, number 36 which has pretty much remained constant over the past 10 years. There has been significant growth in the Limited A and B playing privilege classifications which totals 67, up from 45 at this time last year. While it is nice to see that more of the Association residents are taking advantage of this opportunity, they have no commitment to the Golf Club’s staying power.

The long-term prospects for continued growth of our membership are challenged at best. This has been a banner year for residential sales within the Covenant; however, unlike the past where the Golf Club garnered over 30 percent of the new residents, we have been in the 8-12 percent range now for the past three years. Since we have a limited number of Association residents from which to draw members

and

since there is much more competition with adjacent golf clubs, we continue to try everything that we can to maintain a membership level of at least 500. In June of 2008, only five years ago, we had 613 members, so we have lost almost 20 percent of our members in that short period.

It is incumbent upon both the membership of the Golf Club

and

the greater Association to do everything within our power to generate new members for the Rancho Santa Fe Golf Club. We all believe that this is one of the greatest assets of the Covenant Association, but without continuing to aggressively market this esteemed venue to the “outside world” and to support the recommended membership category changes proposed by the Board of Governors, it will be difficult to keep a stable membership level which is imperative if we want to uphold our vision of having “one of the finest traditional golf clubs in the country.”

As the Review readers can see, while the membership of the Golf Club is reasonably stable at the present time, everyone needs to help in the continuing effort to market the Golf Club to all Association members, especially new property owners! Further, the Association board needs to help the Golf Club by allowing these proposed membership opportunities to be approved. The golf course has never been in better shape, the food service is beyond compare and the staff are some of the most friendly people you can find, so please take the time to come down to the Club to see what we have to offer!

Steve Dunn