Foundation Golf day 2024

On a beautiful sunny day at the Royal Eastbourne Golf Club 72 eager golfers assembled for coffee and bacon rolls at the beginning of what proved to be an excellent day of golf to generate funds for the Peter Bibby Award. 

Awarded in honour of inspirational Eastbourne cricketing legend, Peter Bibby, and established by his daughter Mirren Mace, this award ensures Peter’s legacy lives on through supporting talented young cricketers at the college.  Mirren’s sons are both now pupils at the college and helped out on the day and it gave the family particular pleasure to welcome back three of the former Bibby Award winners, who after dinner spoke movingly of the impact that receiving the award had had on their lives.

As the teams gathered, excitement mounted, with the prospects of Beat the Pro and Nearest the Pin on the short downhill 16th, Longest Drive on the 12th and the highly contested honour of winning the prize of Best Dressed team, the atmosphere was electric as the claxon sounded the start of the tournament.

18 teams tee’d off to a shotgun start, the format of the day being best two stableford scores per hole. The course was in good condition with many of the greens proving somewhat tricky and extremely fast in places. The subtle slopes and borrows made the putting difficult and many 3 or 4 putts were recorded.

The winning team was the Mighty Four ‘right’ with a might score of 94. Congratulations to: Andy Bordass, Andy Edwards, Rob Hill and David Whatley. In an excruciatingly closely fought second place was AFC with 93 points – commiserations to regular contenders David Beer, Neil Cameron, Paul Lee and Adam Smith. And not far behind, (and I think we all knew) came You Know When You’ve Been Mangoed with 90 points - Geoff Campbell, Chris McGowan, Zack Smith and Jack Sutton

The longest Drive was won by Jack Hughes, Nearest the Pin was Iryna Photiou, and the Best Dressed team was The Invincibles comprised of OEs Tim Mote, Jack Hughes, Harry Rimmer and Peter Walker.

The day, evening dinner, games and a quick auction ensured over £16,000 in total were raised for the Peter Bibby fund with Nick Hoadley being the winner of 60 bottles of wine in the raffle.

Development Director Emma Garrett spoke of the Blue Sky Bursaries Appeal and the newly commissioned Café Sospeso film was played urging all those in the room to give just the cost of a coffee a week to support the bursaries programme at Eastbourne College – you can view it here.

The date for next year has been set for Friday 4 July. if you would like to join in and are interested in securing a particular tee to start at for next year's event, feel free to submit a bid to KJRichardson@eastbourne-college.co.uk. We will notify you closer to the event if your bid is successful, also giving you the opportunity to increase it if you are outbid. We’d also love to hear from you if you are keen to sponsor a hole, donate an auction prize or enter a team.

With enormous appreciation as ever to Martin Lulham of M-Tech for his continued sponsorship and support as well as all our other sponsors and prize givers, and lastly to the Eastbourne Royal for their help with the organisation of what really was an extraordinarily memorable day.