History of the Senior Men’s Golf Association (SMGA)
The SMGA began in the early 1990’s with just a few guys --- we were not as formal or organized as we are now. For example, we just drew balls with numbers when we first started. We used a set of balls with numbers on them. We had about 60 balls that were used at the beginning. You would draw a ball, remember the number and then put it back in the bag. The balls were dropped and balls closest to each other were grouped for two man, three man, and four man tournaments.
In the early years, we paid low gross and low net. We had one member who won low gross every week so after a couple years, we changed to net only. All tournaments were paid in cash, not pro shop book.
Harold Holland started the weekly tournaments with assigned players and expanded that to utilize the lineup sheet when he was tournament director and George Alonge was President his first year. Harold Holland also started the Interclub Tournaments with Hurricane Creek and it expanded from there.
When Dave Mehall became President (2003), he started moving everything to a computer based system including membership, voting, and notifications / communications / newsletters. Dave also started alternating the lineup criteria such as AD-BC one week and AC-BD the next week. This was done to get more members playing with a larger group of other members and also to make it more equitable for all members. The Club also purchased new software that enabled us to make lineups using the criteria we desired. This had to be done manually up to this time.
Generally, each president has brought some changes. We converted from cash payout to shop credit under John Anthony (2004), dropped out of the Dallas Senior Interclub (DSI) and began an annual match play event (extends over several months) under Bruce Cox (2005), began paying closest to the hole cash prizes for all par threes under Oliver (2006). Jerry Obenour created the SMGA website which went on-line in October of 2006. Changed the match play to a double elimination format under Jerry Obenour (2007), revised and expanded annual awards and added a free Christmas lunch under Chavez & Holec, and Don Holec (2009) initiated the annual “Tin Cup’ Tournament with Eldorado CC, the Gold Tee Program and expanded the Player of the Year award to three separate age brackets. Jerry Obenour (2014) expanded the Gold Tee Program to include Green Tees and in 2019 removed the age and Handicap Index requirements. You can now play the tee boxes that most suit your game, however, the majority of your GHIN scores have to be from that tee box.
Larry Christensen (2011) with significant help from Jerry Obenour, moved the SMGA data to the "cloud" (using a Google account) to facilitate officer access to common data and ease the transfer of information to new officers. Pete Clark (2013) began the internet signup for SMGA events, replacing the old paper-based sign up sheets with a Sign Up Genius system created by Jerry Obenour. That system was replaced by Golf Genius in 2017 by Jerry Obenour, it now contains all the SMGA data (Roster, Emails, Tournament Results, Clalendars, etc.) and is what we currently use.
In 2016, we eliminated the Tin Cup” tournament with Eldorado, and Interclub Director Mitchum introduced the Quad-Club, a one-time interclub event with three other nearby Clubs. In mid-2016 we began transitioning to a new website concept (Golf Genius) that allowed us to combine our Roster, Scheduling, Sign Ups, Tournament Results, and Email into one integrated system. The Quad-Club proved hard to get done so we only had one in 2017, and eliminated it entirely in 2018.
Then in mid-March 2020 the COVID pandemic struck, all group play was suspended, The SMGA had no events until July 2020. We used individual tee times with no pre or post round meetings until mid-May of 2021. We then resumed the shotgun start and resumed normal play after being essentially shut down for fourteen months.
The original by-laws were written by John Kinney in 1994, and have been revised every few years, the last update was Jan 1, 2019 to harmonize with the major Rules of Golf revision of 2019.
To see the History of all SMGA Officers, CLICK HERE!
Last revised 6/21/2021