Wales Golf join Gareth Bale in drive for diversity and inclusion

By day Brandie Deignan works as a chief executive in NHS primary care in England. She has previously held senior leadership roles in hospitality, aviation and retail.

As she speaks, a group of 12 and 13-year-old girls from Llanishen High School in Cardiff are practising their chipping and putting in the drizzle behind her.

They are part of the Leadership in Sport – Girls to Golf programme which aims to attract schoolgirls by combining sporting skills with leadership qualities.

Deignan hopes some of the girls on the programme will keep playing in future.

“It was just like a dream come true, walking into a golf club and seeing 15 amazing young women who have never played, who have been given the experience and the opportunity to play,” she says.

“I mean, it’s priceless. And 99% of them said to me, they love golf, and they will stay in golf. Now, there is the magic of this.

“Now, if we did nothing but to give these young women that we’ve seen today the experience of golf, the warmth of golf, the feeling that they belong – because that’s the sense I got from them – we would have done something really special.

“Most of all, if they went back and told a few of their friends, their family, their relatives, about golf, that is brilliant.

“But we’ve got to fix the access problem in golf, because we’ve got a real access issue in golf, and from a Wales Golf perspective we’re working really, really hard [to improve that].

“That’s why we’re doing things like this, because we’ve got to have open access.”