In addition to golf simulators and a putting green, CitySwing also has a full food and beverage … [+]
Living in downtown D.C., Tari Cash often found herself looking for a spot to hit balls and work on her golf swing for 30 or 40 minutes without having to hop in a car and make the drive out to the nearest range. Rather than wait on another entrepreneur to fill the gap in the market she decided to start up her own and one that would stand out from the sea of simulator bar concepts that have been popping up domestically for the past several years.
An incident in the spring of 2020 when police were called on five African-American women for allegedly playing golf too slowly at a semi-private course in Pennsylvania they had just joined, further galvanized her resolve to start-up the business with a mission of inclusion.
“Hearing stories like that motivated me and validated my belief that there was an opportunity to create something different in the golf industry. I want to be known as a place where women and people of color and all people are really very welcomed and quite frankly wanted,” Cash says.
Cash took her first golf lessons when she was 16 at The Country Club at Brookline where her father who had taken up the sport later in life was a member. Her mother had come up with the idea that Tari, her brother, and herself would take a couple lessons and then surprise her husband with a tee time for the family as a Father’s Day present. Now, two lessons isn’t really enough to brave a golf course, especially one that has played host to multiple U.S. Opens and a Ryder Cup.
“To this day he still says that was his worst Father’s Day experience ever because we were letting people through and I think he was royally embarrassed. But that was te start of my golf journey,” Cash says.
While she didn’t take up the sport right then and there, learning the fundamentals at that stage in her life came in handy when she did start taking the game seriously as a young professional. Before enrolling in Harvard Business School to pursue an MBA, she worked at Citigroup
“It was there that I realized that I loved retail, that I loved managing P&L’s and it was there that I think my entrepreneurial spirit was really born,” Cash says.
Post-graduation she went to work for Penske Automotive Group and was schooled in their general manager training program, learning how to run car dealerships. She would go on to work at Tesla
“It didn’t take me long to realize that the executives in all the companies that I worked for were golfers. If I wanted to build relationships at the most senior level of the companies that I worked for then golf was going to be my strategic tool in order to develop those relationships,” Cash says.
While the opportunities for professional advancement spurred Cash to give the sport a serious go, she quickly fell in love with the game because of the constant challenges and how the game never fails to humble even its most accomplished players.
When you walk in to CitySwing which opens its first permanent location this week following a string of popups over the past couple years, you are most likely to hear 1990s hip-hop playing on the speaker system and see Cash’s team milling about in jeans and t-shirts. While it doesn’t feel at all like a stuffy country club, they take golf very seriously with PGA certified staff on hand to provide instruction on Trackman simulators, though if people are just there for hits and giggles, and to have a good time, that’s fine too.
One of the keys to making golf more approachable to her target market is representation. As Cash puts it, if you don’t see anybody that looks like you, then why would you put yourself into an uncomfortable position in your free time.
In 1964, Althea Gibson became the first African-American woman to play on the LPGA tour but in the over half century since the tennis star turned golfer broke the color barrier, we’ve only seen a handful of players follow in her footsteps and have yet to see a black woman win an event on the tour. In a nod to black women’s golf history, there’s a photo of Renee Powell on the wall at CitySwing. Powell played in 250 professional tournaments over her career, topped the leaderboard at the 1973 Kelly Springfield Open in Brisbane, Australia and is currently the head professional at Clearview Golf Club in East Canton Ohio. Currently Mariah Stackhouse is the only Black player with full-time status on the LPGA Tour and only the seventh to ever play on the tour but Cash is optimistic that the pro ranks will be more diverse going forward.
“There are some really good junior golfers coming up the ranks so I am very encouraged that it is going to change in the future. That being said, we still have a long way to go and that’s where CitySwing comes into play. We are focused at the top of the funnel, and I think by the work we are doing at the top of the funnel, in five to ten years we are going to help contribute to finding those winners on the LPGA circuit,” Cash says.
In addition to the retail operation CitySwing runs a charitable foundation which designed a 40-foot long truck with a simulator on either end of the trailer. The golf truck’s mission is to take the game to unexpected places where you don’t expect to see golf. The golf truck’s first event was the Broccoli City Music Festival—a D.C. music festival whose 2022 edition was headlined by 21 Savage, Ari Lennox and Lil Durk. They also partnered with PGA Reach as part of their Beyond the Green initiative during the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship hosting a group of young ladies who were spending a day learning about careers in the golf industry.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikedojc/2022/07/07/cityswing-on-a-mission-to-make-golf-more-inclusive-and-approachable/