🌿 Women Shaping How the Game is Played

Sharon Eales & Fiona Womack – Playability Consultants

In today’s golf landscape, where design meets data and tradition meets innovation, Sharon Eales and Fiona Womack stand out as pioneers in playability consulting — a new frontier in how golf courses are analysed, adjusted, and experienced.

Both bring deep knowledge of the game from inside the ropes — combining professional playing backgrounds, technical insight, and a shared commitment to ensuring that golf courses challenge and inspire all players, not just a select few.

Their work sits at the intersection of architecture and experience. Through careful study of tee positioning, green approach angles, bunker placement, and course setup, they assess how design translates into real-world play for golfers of every ability. Using advanced data tools, on-course observation, and player feedback, Sharon and Fiona provide actionable recommendations that enhance fairness, flow, and enjoyment without altering a course’s essential character.

At its heart, their approach honours what the best designers have always known: a great golf course is one that invites everyone to play their best game.

Together, Eales and Womack represent a new generation of women influencing the game — not from the drawing board alone, but through the lived rhythm of golf itself. Their insights are helping clubs and architects re-examine how design, maintenance, and setup combine to shape the modern player’s experience.

From championship venues to community courses, their philosophy is clear:

“Playability is not about making golf easier — it’s about making it make sense.”

Sharon Eales – Precision, Perspective, and Player Insight

With a career grounded in competitive golf and course analysis, Sharon Eales combines a player’s instinct with an analytical eye.
Her background spans coaching, performance measurement, and course evaluation — experience that allows her to interpret data not as numbers, but as stories about how golfers interact with the landscape.

Sharon has worked with clubs and course architects across the UK and Europe, delivering comprehensive playability reports and re-rating studies that balance tradition with technical accuracy.
Her goal is to make golf more intuitive: to help courses play as their designers intended, regardless of who is on the tee.

Key focus areas:

• Course setup analysis and gender-equitable rating

• On-site observation and shot-pattern mapping

• Consulting for championship and community-level venues

• Translating data into player-focused design adjustments

Fiona Womack – Strategy, Sensitivity, and Sustainable Challenge

Fiona Womack brings both creative and technical understanding to the art of course playability.
Drawing on years of coaching and consultancy work, she examines how course layout, environmental conditions, and player psychology interact. Her work centres on balance — ensuring courses offer strategic interest and enjoyment without sacrificing fairness or sustainability.

Fiona’s playability reviews are valued by clubs seeking to modernise layouts or adapt classic designs to evolving standards.
She is known for her empathetic approach — consulting with members, superintendents, and architects to craft solutions that improve experience while respecting original design intent.

Key focus areas:

• Gender-balanced course setup and tee system evaluation

• Bunker placement, approach angles, and strategy review

• Member engagement and player-experience feedback

• Supporting clubs in R&A Women in Golf Charter commitments

Their Approach & Impact

Together, Eales and Womack offer a consultancy model that blends field research, technical precision, and collaborative learning.
They use data-driven assessment — including yardage mapping, dispersion studies, and pace-of-play analysis — alongside on-course immersion, walking every hole to see how it truly performs.

Their reports typically include:

• Playability ratings for multiple golfer profiles (male, female, senior, junior)

• Recommendations for tee and fairway realignment to improve flow

• Evaluation of hazards for strategic and visual balance

• Suggestions for inclusive yardage systems and course communications

Their philosophy aligns perfectly with the aims of the Women’s Golf History Project: to recognise how women continue to shape golf’s evolution — not only through competition or governance, but through design intelligence and experiential understanding.

They remind the industry that inclusion is not about changing who plays golf — it’s about how the game welcomes.

Closing Reflection

In every fairway measured and every bunker mapped, Sharon Eales and Fiona Womack are rewriting what it means to “design” a golf course.
Their work ensures that the artistry of architects like Alice Dye and Marion Hollins continues to evolve — that modern courses remain playable, relevant, and inspiring for generations to come.

As stewards of how golf feels, they embody a truth at the heart of the women’s game:

Golf endures not because it resists change, but because it learns from those who play it.