WGA's new offices under construction

Reporting from Chicago

Thursday, December 20, 2018

The Western Golf Association, headquartered in the tiny north suburban village of Golf since April 1955, is building a new office building in nearby Glenview.

The building, at 2501 Patriot Boulevard, two blocks south of Willow Road and around the corner from The Glen Club, will either be the association’s new headquarters or an office building to alleviate the strain on the present headquarters building on Briar Road near the Golf train station.

The WGA has needed more space and was seeking a new headquarters site for some time. It currently rents office space in downtown Chicago for its development – i.e., fund-raising – department, and in Oak Brook for tournament operations. The Evans Scholars operation, as well as the administration and public relations departments, remains in the Golf headquarters building.

This story broke in the late hours of Thursday. Western Golf has made no announcement on a groundbreaking, but the construction is well along.

Reporter Rory Spears both found the in-progress development and confirmed the WGA as the client of the construction firm with the village of Glenview building department on Thursday.

The WGA’s operations have exploded since John Kaczkowski succeeded Don Johnson as the CEO in 2010. It’s adding a Web.com Tour tournament in 2019 at The Glen Club and, thanks to increased fundraising via Kaczkowski-created initatives such as the Green Coat Gala and Match Play Challenge (the latter inspired by Mike Keiser), and revenue from the BMW Championship, is on track toward having 1,000 Evans Scholars in universities in the Midwest and Northwest by 2020, almost 200 more than when Kaczkowski was elevated from tournament director to boss. That will be the 90th anniversary of the admission of the first two Scholars to Northwestern.

– Tim Cronin

Photos of the construction site by Rory Spears / GolfersOnGolf.com

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This story will be updated when more specifics are available.