TRYALL, Hanover – Despite yet another close competition that went all the way to the third day, the organisers of the 56th Jamaica Golf Association (JGA) Open, presented by Aqua Bay Villa have admitted they need to improve on the marketing of the tournament that is becoming a favourite for a number of American players.

Fifty-six players, including 31 in the professional category, participated in the 54-hole tournament that was played on the reconfigured Tryall Club course October 29-31.

American Andrew Arft, who only heard about the tournament a week before it started, had a wire-to-wire win, leading from the first round to card a seven under par 209, and took the US$20,000 first prize.

Four shots separated the top six finishers, all Americans as 76 players contested the event in 2022 while 64 showed up the year before and Peter Chin, chairman of the organising committee, said not enough marketing was done as well as playing the event earlier could have resulted in the low turnout.

“Although the field was smaller this year, once again we had great competition and all the categories were highly competitive. As usual, all the players enjoyed it and all said they will come again,” Chin told the Jamaica Observer on the final day of the competition.

He explained that circumstances outside of their control saw the tournament being played in late October, almost a month earlier than it is usually played, and they were not able to get the word out in time.

“What we need to do next year is to confirm the time of the event much earlier because what has happened in the past [is that] it has always been in November, end of November, and this year due to circumstances we had to change it to October,” he pointed out, “and so a number of people who had planned to come got caught out, so next year we need to let them know a little earlier.”

Chin, however, gave the organisers a high score for the execution of the tournament. The truth is we have a template, we have done this so often, we have the transport down pat, we have registration down pat and the officiating as well. I wouldn’t say it was perfect but a good seven-and-a-half out of 10.”

Asked what they can do to make the event better next year, he said: “I think on the promotion, yes definitely, because we do have help from our sponsors and from Tryall, so I believe it’s getting, you know, to get more people to come in and play. So marketing, I think, although many players have come out and we do have a lot of repeat players its just that the timing was off but all in all we are happy.”

Two days before the start of the competition, Ewan Peebles, the Director of golf at Tryall, had predicted that the course would be tough as they have narrowed a number of the fairways and said the players would have to focus more on keeping their balls in play.

Asked on the final day what he thought about how the course played, Peebles said: “I think the golf course very, very quickly identified the best players in the field. I suspected that the winning score wouldn’t be quite as low this year, as it was in previous years just due to the set-up.

“We haven’t had much wind. I didn’t really factor that in but a lot of the feedback has been that yeah, the rough is difficult. It’s difficult to to score low if you’re not hitting the fairways.”