BMGA Budget Recap

Each year, the BMGA Board gets asks “where does the money go” that members pay in dues and other fees. Last year we posted a breakdown of revenue and spend to organization and the board received positive feedback on the transparency of that information.

To continue that one-year-old tradition, I thought now would be a good time to describe the breakdown of costs for the BMGA including both Wednesday Night and Weekend Events.

The 2025 BMGA revenue comes from these categories:

• BMGA Dues: $75 per player
• WNL Dues: $405 per player
• Weekend Tournament: $60 per player
  • NOTE: Club Championship and Calcutta are more due to multiround event.

In addition to the above, the BMGA uses sponsor money and potential reserves (carry over funds) as revenue sources. It is important to remember that 100% of the sponsor money for a tournament, goes back to that tournament in the prize pool. For example, The True North Greek Scramble has an additional $500 prize pool in play.

If you haven’t, take a moment and visit the websites of all of our 2025 sponsors. You can find the link here: https://bmga.org/bmga-sponsors/. Without the sponsors, we would not be able to do what we do!

With money from BMGA Dues, WNL Dues and funds carried over from the previous year, the BMGA is working with a $94,985 budget for 2025.

A few notes based on the above breakdown are important to call out.

• Our carry over for 2025 into 2026 is going to be larger than expected. When we did our budget in January we planned on a total of 198 paid members. 192 WNL and 6 Weekend Only. At current, we have 209 paid members and still receiving interest daily for the weekend play.
• One of our big goals for 2025 was to hold dues steady as much as possible. In 2024 there were several changes that increased member dues (green fees, beverage costs, new taxes and new 18% service charge). The total cost is 2024 was $480 per member, that number remained the same for 2025 but was split differently:
  • BMGA Dues went from $90 to $75 per member.
  • WNL Dues went from $390 to $405 per member.
• In 2025 there were no changes in our costs from Brookview but we do expect to see golf and beverages expenses to increase for 2026.

One big change form 2024 to 2025 came in the form of weekend tournaments and dues. Our previous per tournament cost was $65 per tournament with a breakdown as shown below:

As you can see, for each player on a weekend tournament the BMGA was in revenue deficit by $8.02. On a given weekend, we would cause us to run a deficit of between $400 and $500 dollars. We had previously off set this by the some of the BMGA Dues – essentially using all dues as a way to pay for weekend tournament. Other funds were used from our savings to cover the shortfall.

One of our goals for 2025 was to ensure that weekend tournaments were cost-neutral. This allows the BMGA to better plan for costs long term. For example, if we planned on 50 players per weekend as our average and suddenly had 90 players per weekend, our cost impact could put the BMGA in financial hardship.

For weekend tournaments in 2025 the breakdown of money is now as follows:

Based on the feedback from our members in 2024 during our survey, over 80% of players on weekend said to remove the drink tickets from weekend events. Additionally, 80% of our members said the cost of weekend tournament was too high. With this information, we made two changes for 2025.

• Removed drink tickets from weekend tournaments. At a cost of $6.90 per ticket, or $13.80 per player, it was the main driver to why our weekend tournaments were running at a deficit.
• We were able to reduce the cost of weekend tournaments from $65 to $60.

As noted above, we expect to go into 2025 with a small bump in our savings. If there are changes to green fees and beverages in 2026, we will be able to use those savings to help offset member dues for future years. As always, if you have any questions for the board, please do not hesitate to reach out to myself or any board member.

Thanks!
The BMGA Board