The Australian PGA with the golf club launched this week its best-ever feature pro-am event yet.

The announcement that the Mowbray Pro-Am will be changed to a Sunday next March has ambitious club general manager Patrick Bessell predicting its biggest tournament in the club’s five-year association with the PGA.

“We’d expect to see quite a few people out here next year, especially being a Sunday format instead of a previous Friday,” Bessell said.

“We’d expect to see a lot more people actually out here watching as well.”

The shift is also expected to attract more professional players to Mowbray, one of seven Tasmanian clubs to run Pro-Ams annually.

“In the past, we’ve had 37 or more pros involved every year here,” Bessell said

“We’d expect those numbers to be high, if not higher next year, just based on this Northern Tassie loop we’ve got with the back-to-back Prospect event and ours now being the biggest event in the state.

“This means having more names on the course means more players too, from both the pros and the amateurs, and hopefully that translates to more people being out on the course watching it.”

The Mowbray Pro-Am is the finale to a golf schedule that stretches across 11 days for touring professionals to Tasmania. 

The series starts in the south of the state and heads north for the three biggest events held in succession.

The change of days will also be a financial winner for Mowbray from corporate backers of the Pro-Am event.

But it will also attract greater sponsorship and also prizemoney that has now leaped to $20,000, as a lure for mainland pros to contest the Sunday round format.

“It certainly opens it up for having more players available,” Bessell said.

But the club also didn’t want to shut out its grassroots players from involvement.

“Your everyday chopper may not play in the event,” Bessell said.

“But a lot of very handy golfers will try and take it as an opportunity to play alongside a pro and learn from the experience.”

The Pro-Am on March 4 also coincides with the golf club’s peak period next year.

Both the men’s and ladies club championship will begin in February and its pennant season is held in March.

Bessell predicts that the fairways and greens will be conducive for top golf in time for the Pro-Am.

“They’ll be pretty quick – we expect them to be high quality,” he said.

“The course will be in its best condition at that point, with more man hours going into it.”