Council agrees to help fund golf tournament

Darlington County Council agreed Monday to give $2,500 in county funding to help keep a junior golf tournament in Hartsville for its 11th consecutive year.

The Players Championship, which is sanctioned by the South Carolina Junior Golf Association, is considered one of the top junior tournaments in the state, tournament director Lewis Brown told council members in requesting the funding.

Brown said the tournament, which will take place at the Hartsville Country Club the weekend of Nov. 15 and 16, is expected to have an economic impact of about $136,000 in the Hartsville area.

The tournament has grown steadily for 10 years thanks to the help of four sponsors, but this year, it is losing those four, Brown said.

“We need to raise over $10,000 to maintain the tournament’s high standards and to ensure we keep the tournament in Hartsville,” he said.

Brown said tournament organizers are halfway to meeting that goal, with just two weeks remaining before the tournament. “We’re asking Darlington County to assist us this year with $2,500,” he said.

The funding will come from council’s discretionary fund.

The money will help cover such expenses as golf course rental, gifts for players and food costs, Brown said.

Brown said 115 junior golfers from across South Carolina will participate in this year’s tournament, representing about 50 cities and towns around the state. More than 90 percent of those will travel 70 miles or greater, he said.

Most tournament families travel with both parents and siblings, he said, and organizers expect about 400 travelers coming into the area for the event.

Organizers expect more than 100 hotel and motel rooms in the area to be booked for two nights for the event, at a total of about $20,000. They also expect related expenses for items such as dining, retail shopping and gasoline at about $20,000, he said.

He said organizers expect direct spending in the area from the two-day tournament to be about $68,000. The American Junior Golf Association says that figure can be doubled to estimate the overall economic impact of a tournament on a local community, Brown said.

“As long as we can keep up the standards, we have in the past, we can keep this tournament,” Brown said.

“From the tourism aspect, this brings tremendous exposure to Darlington County and Hartsville,” he said. “I just felt like this is a tremendous opportunity.”

Other intangible benefits from keeping the tournament in Hartsville include networking opportunities for families and business leaders from across the state, as well as exposure for Coker College and the S.C. Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics, Brown said. More than half of the players in the tournament are of high school age, he said.

Brown acknowledged that his request represented a “band aid approach” for this year with the tournament so close and the loss of the sponsors.

He said that next year tournament organizers plan to seek funding from the county’s South Carolina accommodations tax allocation. The accommodations tax is the state tax collected on hotel and motel accommodations. That revenue is redistributed to cities and counties to promote tourism at the local level.

Councilman Dannie Douglas of Society Hill expressed a concern about council setting a precedent if it granted the request.

Councilwoman Wilhelmina Johnson of Darlington, who cast the only vote against granting the request, echoed that concern. “Don’t open up a can of worms without some consideration,” she said.

Councilman Wesley Blackwell of Hartsville said council granted a similar request for the NASCAR Car Haulers Parade in downtown Darlington to help it get started in its first year.