The Lady Golf Community

Dear WIGI Members Consider this our first newsletter and memo to all of you who have already joined and a gentle reminder to those of you who may still be thinking about joining. For the time being, we will try to do as much as possible electronically to save on costs of paper, postage and envelopes. The exception to that will be your membership cards which will be sent out next week.

Please welcome our first group of founding members. These memberships were received prior to the PGA Merchandise Show on Jan 24th. So just because your name isn't here, doesn't mean that your check didn't get here yet, just that it's in that big old stack of mail on the corner of the desk that's next up on the to do list.

Gail Billingsley -- heads up marketing for Reed Expositions, the company that runs the PGA Merchandise Show. With Gail's assistance, we were able to place a sign in the association lounge and had a place to hold meetings to answer questions about WIGI at the recent PGA Show in Orlando. More on that later. Jan Brintnall is an LPGA Teaching pro in Mid-Michigan so if you are looking for golf or lessons in that area, you now have a new contact.

Eileen Broderick -- is an expert in soft goods. For untold seasons she was with Golf World magazine and recently formed her own consultant business. Or in the words of founder MaryBeth Lacy, she is going to get paid for giving the same kind of advice to people that she used to give them for free.
Jamie Rogerro-Carbone is a media relations manager for the PGA of America. She was remarried in the last two years, and I keep trying to put her in the Rs instead of the Cs. Jamie knows just about everybody in the golf business and is heavily involved in all the PGA of America tournaments interfacing with members of the media.

Amy Caruso -- is the Communications manager for the First Tee which is headquartered in St. Augustine, Fl. at the World Golf Village.
Judy Fitzgerald -- is in business with her husband doing custom golf ball packaging. The company is called The Ad Couple.

Marta Fitzwilliam works at the Little Miami Golf Center in Cincinnati, OH as a Service Representative. She graduated from Northwestern Univeristy.
Terry Gamer heads up her own company called The Hole View, which creates outstanding yardage books for prominent courses across the country. She has worked with founders Marlene Livaudais and Joann Dost.

Roberta Isleib is an author with a new golf mystery coming out in June of 2002 called Six Strokes Under.
Chris Jones owns two golf courses in the Northwest. One is the Brookdale Golf Course in Tacoma, Washington.
Dove Jones -- heads her own company which does, among other things, pr for Perry Golf.
Perry Golf creates and conducts extremely high end golf travel vacations to all parts of the world. Dove has her MBA, so don't let that blonde hair fool you.

Christine Lovrine is a renaissance golf woman she does it all as the head pro, manager and superintendent for 12 years in Fisher, Indiana.
Donna Carr-McCardle is with a firm called All About Golf.
They manage PGA Tour player Len Mattiace among other activities.
Joanne Miller is a college golfer who now works as PR Manager for Tour Edge. She was kind enough to walk me through the new Bazooka driver and the new Tour Edge ladies golf line at the recent PGA Show.
When she says she never hit a drive as far as with the new Bazooka monster driver, you can believe her.

Kelly Mooney heads up her own pr - firm and represents Ogio Golf, which is a cutting edge golf bag manufacturer, and she was also at the PGA Show.

Nancy Cramer Pingitore is Co-Founder and VP Sales for Incanta, Incl a company that raises money for developing golf courses.
Donna Potis is an avid golfer who is involved in club repair, and so far as I know, is one of the few women who do this. To date, I know of four women clubmakers. Three were at the PGA Show, and another contacted us regarding membership. Stephanie Parel is with the USGA

Patricia Simpson--- is with Wild Dunes resort in South Carolina.
Alyson Ramsey Director of Media Relations and Communications of the New Jersey State Golf Association and does consulting a performance enhancement specialist.
Sheryl Snelling came to us from Christine Lovrine. She is an assistant pro with a 3 handicap. ( think anybody will want her for a partner in a team match?)
Debbie Waitkus heads up a company called Golf for Cause

What a wonderful, diverse and interesting group of new founding members!

The PGA Show in Orlando the week of Jan. 25-28,.was a wonderful opportunity for us to meet women we know and those we don't to let them know about our group.
MaryBeth Lacy, Helen Casey, Pat Baldwin and I were there for at least a day or two. Everyone was working at making new contacts for WIGI as well as conducting other business. Hats off no pun intended Helen -- to Helen who had to have handed out between 150 and 200 membership applications. She personally papered as many industry women as she could.
Helen, for those of you who do not know her, often appears in absolutely stunning hats!

In addition, Gail Billlingsley created a space for us in the Association Lounge where we put up a sign about membership and held two half hour sessions on Friday and Saturday for anyone who wanted to meet a human and find out more about the organization. Everyone we spoke to agreed that this is something we all need.
So we hope to increase the membership substantially within the next month or so as those people who attended the show join.
The PGA Show has a daily news magazine, and the editors kindly put our announcement in it, also, which led to some additional calls and inquiries.

Terry Gamer will also be attending the Golf Course Superintendents Show and will have a sign about WIGI and membership applications at her booth during that show.
Pat Baldwin is researching bylaws for us. No one better to be on that task than Pat.
She has also put us in touch with Debbie Yasenka at edigitel.net who offered on behalf of their company to create a website for us -- gratis. We are in the process of evaluating that offer.
They are to send us a proposal in writing. They currently do sites for Ernie Els and Ty Tryon.

We will set up a public site that has information on membership and perhaps a business profile on a member, and a private site with information just FOR members. That may be special offers, postings of jobs, travel deals, hospitality deals. We don't know the full scope of that yet, but part of it will depend on what you want it to be. Looking for a place to play golf, a travel special, a way to create a trip for the golf gals in your area, a honeymoon vacation on or off the golf course, or just a good restaurant in a distant town, we hope this bulletin board will become a valuable tool for all of us.

We have opened a bank account well the paperwork is in process so your checks will clear very soon. There will always be two signatures on the account.
One thing everyone seems to agree on is the need to get together once a year to do something.
So we will be working on that idea. Pinehurst has already expressed an interest -- again through Founder Pat Baldwin. So we will investigate that offer further. A couple of other locations have made inquiries. We will evaluate whether we want programs that are just golf related, like clinics and new equipment to test, or if we want to add other informational seminars on women's issues like those in Christine Northrup's books on women's health, female stuff like gycolic facials or collagen at noon hour, or advice on retirement planning.

We will keep you posted as news and offers come up. And for those of you who are members, I will next week send a lists of members and their emails so you can network sensibly.

Kathy Bissell for WIGI

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