Renate Roeleveld’s route into golf club management was not conventional, but it shaped the way she looks at her role and the industry in general. What’s more, she believes her approach can help other women make their way into golf management.

If she’s correct in her assertion that golf management is largely a profession populated by grey-haired, middle-aged white men, then some might bristle at her comments. But, even so, that doesn’t mean the general manager at Golfbaan Sluispolder, in Amsterdam, is wrong.

A member of the Dutch Golf Course Owners Association, she is at the vanguard of the movement to encourage more women into the sport – not just picking up a club, but learning to run one as well. And the crux of her message is simple: to encourage more women to play, you need more women in management roles.

She explained: “I have seen what women need to start playing golf. What I said in my presentation at the last GCAE Golf Business Conference, in Portugal, was that in most countries it’s still a very white, male-dominated management scene.

“I told them we all scream there should be more women playing golf, but to fully understand them, you need a woman who makes a programme, because you cannot let a man decide how a woman feels.

“I think the first thing is for a golf manager, golf course owner, whatever, to understand if they want to have more women golfers in, they really do need more women on boards and management because they know how women feel.”

Having studied hotel management at one of the world’s leading schools, in The Hague, Roeleveld moved to South Africa where she worked for an office furniture business before a move back to the Netherlands saw her begin a career in IT.

She smiled: “It was booming back then. That was the time that you drove away with a new car as soon as you signed your contract to become an IT person.”

But she quickly realised IT was not for her and responded to an advertisement for a sales and event manager at a golf club. And, she recalls, she said to one of her friends from hotel school that “golf is a bit of a Mickey Mouse business because it wasn’t really a big thing back in those days.”

Fortuitously, that friend advised her that a former contemporary of theirs was already working at the club and would be able to offer advice. What’s more, the people who interviewed her were close relatives of a family Roeleveld knew from her time in South Africa. Things were starting to fall into place.

“Within a day, I had a new job in the golf business. I started working in golf, yet I didn’t play. But this was purely the organisational and hospitality side that I was interested in, and they were interested in me.

“That was BurgGolf, and, after two years, the general manager left, and I took over. That was a nice and challenging time because the then owner of BurgGolf was a pioneer in golf in the Netherlands. He was one of the first to see it as a business.

“He had multiple courses, and he took all the managers to the NGCOA conference in the United States. It was a very interesting and fascinating phase, because golf was booming. It was getting more and more professional. We, as managers, were getting more and more professional. After six years, I left BurgGolf and I ended up at Sluispolder. That’s already almost 15 years ago in 2006.”

Sluispolder has 27 holes with all the requisite practice facilities, and Roeleveld utilises a large clubhouse to ensure around one-third of the club’s F&B revenue is not golf related.

She added: “The golf course is owned by a person who has multiple hospitality companies. Everything on the course is run by us, so we’re really a commercial course. We do have a club at my course, but they rent a certain amount of tee times on my course.

“The clubhouse is divided into different parts, and I can close up one part for meetings. Of course, it is a little bit noisier, but, on the other hand, you have a golf course, so they’re all very happy.”

Understandably, Roeleveld is a huge advocate of programmes to get more women into golf – not just picking up a club, but learning to run one as well. And the drive to encourage more women came from her own experience.

“About five years ago, I didn’t see people who represented me – younger women who also enjoy a round of golf, or who are from the sport side of the game. So, I started to set aside an hour on Friday morning for ‘fabulous Friday’.

“A female professional and I took female golfers out on the course, whether they were going to get 54, 76 or 100, we didn’t care. Guide them through the course, give them tips, tricks along the way; not really about the swing, but course management wise.

“We’re now five years down the line and have had hundreds of women pass through the Fab Friday group. And, through this programme, I started realising what was required to make women feel at ease on the golf course, because it’s very different from men.

“I always say when a man has had three golf clinics, he walks on to the golf course and says, ‘Yeah, I can play golf because I’ve already had three golf clinics’.

“A woman can have a handicap of 36 or 30, and in all those years of Fab Friday, I have only had one woman say ‘I’m now good at golf’.

It’s fair to say Roeleveld’s experience of her male counterparts’ attitudes to women in golf is mixed, at best. Yet she has come up with ways to cope and emerge the better for it.

“I’m on the board of the Dutch Golf Course Owners Association; I was at the conference of Players 1st, and we were with contemporaries from right across Europe, and I was, literally, the only woman there. They hired this guy from I don’t know where, some university, to talk about women’s golf,” stated Roeleveld.

“These men started talking about women’s golf, and some Swedish guy said, ‘but we would need toilets on the course’.

“I was like: ‘Really? Women’s golf to you is a toilet on the course?’ They completely missed the whole point. The thing is, if you want to have more female golfers, we need to have more women in leading roles. Otherwise, they will never show up, because they need an example.

“Secondly, we need someone who catches the drift of women playing golf, because a man does not know how a woman feels on the course. That’s just a fact – but a woman does.”

She added: “It might sound feminist, but my advice is to embrace the female touch that we have, and an eye for your surroundings; then, you can make a difference.

“And my advice for women who want to enter the golf business is that they recognise they have this quality – a special quality that grey-haired, white men really don’t have.

“I’m 46 now, so it’s getting better, but when I was 28 and manager at BurgGolf, you don’t want to know how often I was asked ‘can I please speak to the man here – the people who make the decisions?’”

Spend some time in the company of Renate Roeleveld and naive is not a word that would spring immediately to mind. But if that air of insouciance helps more women into positions that enhance golf, then even this grey-haired, middle-aged white man would say ‘more power to her elbow’.