New owners to breath life into former Wingham Golf and Curling Club this season

BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN

New life will be breathed into what used to be known as the Wingham Golf and Curling Club this year with new owners coming aboard to create the Maitland Links Golf Club and the Maitland Granite Curling Club.

 

Scott Bowman of Walkerton, along with a silent partner who prefers to remain anonymous, assumed ownership of the beleaguered club on Jan. 30 and he and his team plan to hit the ground running this year, opening for golf in the spring and the curling in the winter of 2025/2026.

 

No stranger to the area, Bowman is currently a general manager with Speare Seeds in Harriston, a company that deals in forage and turf seeds, supplying many companies what they need for sports fields, golf courses, etc. He has worked there for over a decade after spending much of his career in the golf world.

 

Originally from Listowel, Bowman began working at a golf course in his home town in the 1990s before taking the Golf Course Technician program at Seneca College, followed by further studies in Turfgrass Management at the University of Guelph. That foundation led him to jobs at Goderich’s The Maitland Golf Club and the Elmira Golf Club before taking a job with the ClubLink group in the late 1990s.

 

That job took him to Greystone Golf Club in Milton, where he served as the superintendent for a number of years before being transferred to Oakville’s storied Glen Abbey Golf Club, where he began as the golf course superintendent and became the head superintendent, overseeing two RBC Canadian Open tournaments there in 2008 and 2009 before leaving the golf world in 2011 in an effort to get closer to home.

 

That’s when Bowman made his way to Speare Seeds, where he still works. However, in 2016, an opportunity arose to purchase SouthPort Golf Course in Southampton and Bowman took it.

 

At the time, Bowman said in an interview with The Citizen, the club was struggling. It had very few members and was in need of renovations, so there was work to be done, but the club has been improved and membership has grown in the years since.
That club, he said, is very similar to the Wingham club, in that it’s a nine-hole course with a driving range.

 

Bowman heard about the club ceasing its golf and curling operations and exploring a sale late last year and successfully took part in the tender process, earning him the title of the new owner of the club in December, leading up to the official ownership changeover date of Jan. 30.

 

The two clubs will be changing names, as mentioned, and Bowman said it was all about bringing in that history of the Maitland River through that part of Huron County and tying it to the history of golf with “Links” in the new name.

 

No official grand opening or opening weekend have been set, of course, as golf is so weather-dependent, but it will return this spring, summer and fall ahead of the return of curling the following winter.

 

Bowman says it’s hard to know too much until the snow melts, but he did do a full walk-through last year before the snow came and has some ideas about minor improvements that can be made to the course regarding playability and to some of the landscaping, but those will all come in due time.

 

In addition to some immediate minor changes, Bowman says the hope is also to set out a one-, three- and five-year capital plan for some of the more intensive projects that will be coming up in the next five years. 

 

The future of the restaurant, however, is uncertain. Bowman said he knows that the previous owners had recently injected some money into improvements for the kitchen, but he’ll be assessing in his first few weeks to see if and where it fits into the club’s future.

 

Right off the bat, however, he hopes to connect with the local community, explore partnerships and sponsorships and just introduce himself to the community and endeavour to bring people back to the club.

 

Bowman hopes it will be a great place for people to golf, curl, connect and enjoy themselves in a relaxed atmosphere and that it truly finds itself a home in the community with the people of the Wingham area and beyond.