Headline: East Longmeadow Native and Nextgengolf Founder Kris Hart Featured in Golf Digest Magazine

For Immediate Release: April 27, 2016

Kris Hart

Norton, MA — The name of Kris Hart has been a fixture in local golf circles for years. After all the East Longmeadow native has made it his passion - and now his career - to grow the sport of golf and create better access for the generation known as "Millennials".

Hart is the founder of Nextgengolf. The organization originated as a Boston-based affordable golf membership program for recreational college students called CollegeGolfPass, which helped make golf more affordable for college students.

The company expanded nationwide after merging with The National Collegiate Club Golf Association (NCCGA) in 2013. In the first year of the merger, the company started 100+ new club golf programs and supported over 10,000 student golfers.

His efforts have been covered locally, regionally and nationally including on the Golf Channel's Morning Drive (click here to view that segment)

Hart's efforts were also recently featured in the latest issue of Golf Digest. CLICK HERE to access that feature or you can read the article below.

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KRIS HART / 3
Minding Millennials

Golf has tons of admirable initiatives to introduce newbies to the game. Fewer are those whose focus is to prevent quitters.

Kris Hart thinks a lot of them are college kids. Not the handful of elites on the varsity roster, but all the rest who, after books and beer, have only so much money to continue a recreational interest.

Hart was almost another golf casualty. He loved the game, but in his senior year at Bryant University in Rhode Island, the uncertain future beyond the cozy womb of academia looming, he quit the team. He needed to study to get his financial license, and going to the golf course five days a week felt excessive. He didn't want to stop entirely, but for the first time in his life he tasted what it was like to pay green fees. He passed the Series 7 exam and landed a job at Morgan Stanley. The lad from East Longmeadow, Mass., was confronted by the various horrors that attend public weekend golf in urban areas.

A spark of an idea, followed by a brash move: Hart quit his job and founded CollegeGolfPass, which successfully negotiated with Boston-area golf courses to offer discounts to the city's roughly 250,000 college students.

In 2013, CollegeGolfPass merged with the National Collegiate Club Golf Association, which had 40 teams. Now that figure is 452. By introducing slick team-management and scoring software, as well as counseling club captains on details like how to navigate university bureaucracy to unlock funding, Hart made mildly organized golf cheaper and easier for a lot of people.

"It might take only a week to get a club team up and running, though sometimes club sports directors are motivated to limit how much they have to oversee," Hart says.

With guidance from Hart's organization, Olivia de Fouchier started the women's club team at Wake Forest. "We use every outlet to recruit, from social media to posters," de Fouchier says. The club used to charge dues, but is now entirely university-funded. Handicaps range from 2 to 20, and there's one mandatory practice a week.

Hart's other mission is to stay engaged with golfers after they graduate. He has rebranded his seven-person, Boston-based operation as Nextgengolf, which also runs events exclusively for young people under a program called City Tour. As with collegians, Nextgen empowers gung-ho local coordinators to host one-day tournaments. There are no handicaps, with scramble and better-ball divisions, and a national championship.

"I don't love the term 'governing body,' " Hart says, "but essentially we envision being the governing body for 18-34-year-old golf." —Max Adler