KEY POINTS:
One of the key early decisions Bill MacGowan will make as CEO of New Zealand Golf is appointing the high performance manager.
It hardly needs repeating just how unsuccessful the high performance programmes of the last 15 years have been. They have produced not a single world-class player.
Our best golfers are still from a system the late Grant Clements put in place 20 years ago. We have one player in the US Open. Australia has 11 and Sweden five.
NZG can now start a high performance regime where the end game is not winning the Eisenhower Trophy, although that's a step, but having New Zealand players inside the world's top 100 and winning on major tours.
Anything less cannot be acceptable if we're serious. As Stuart Reese, the professional at the Peninsula Golf Club, says: "Amateur golf is like under-19 rugby." What he's saying is that, in golf, the equivalent of All Black level is no longer the World Amateur Teams Championships.
It's the US Open, the Masters and the PGA Tour. New Zealand players are not there. Other countries have leapt past us at an alarmingly quick rate and we must catch up.
I've been reading More than Sunshine and Vegemite by Jim Ferguson, chief executive of the Australian Sports Commission during Australia's golden decade of sporting success in the 1990s. He makes it very clear Australia's emergence as the most successful sporting nation in the world was no accident.
He stresses two absolute non-negotiables: world-class athletes will not emerge unless there is world-class administration to plan and oversee development and high performance programmes; second, sports must try new ideas.
New Zealand has had precious few new ideas in this area in the last 15 years. Top amateurs have been mollycoddled in academy programmes and played mainly in amateur events, with no real accountability for performance.
NZG and its predecessors have never had a full-time professional coach or director of coaching. Mal Tongue and his assistants, who all left in that mess of 2004, were only contracted for a certain number of days a year.
The new high performance manager must start with a clean slate and be a professional golfer. It might be best that he or she is not even from this country.
The last high performance manager didn't even play the game. The new appointee has to assemble top amateurs and fledgling professionals, and work within restrictive budgets to provide a comprehensive support system and performance reviews.
It's what Golf Australia has in Peter Knight and what the various state Institutes of Sport have too.
This new appointment has to be bold and innovative.
It may be that our next world class players are now only 14 years old. But if we're to get back on the world golf radar, we need to change and we need to get started now.