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Missouri Sports Hall of Fame repays funds owed to 24 charities

Highland Springs Country Club hosts the Price Cutter Charity Championship — and hosted Friday's small press conference.
Highland Springs Country Club hosts the Price Cutter Charity Championship — and hosted Friday's small press conference.

Eight months after coming hundreds of thousands of dollars short, the hosts of the Price Cutter Charity Championship are finally square with their nonprofit partners.

Back in November, the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame was supposed to award the money raised from their yearly golf tournament to local charity sponsors in an event called the Celebration of Sharing. Instead, then-director Byron Shive announced that the charity simply did not have the requisite money to do so, citing "rising expenses, inflationary pressures, and an unforeseen staff absence."

So when Rob Marsh took over as head of the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in January, he had his work cut out for him. Marsh — a former Price Cutter executive who had worked on the tournament extensively from the grocery chain's side of things — not only has to repair the Hall's financial situation, but also it's public relations situation and the actual, physical building, which remains closed.

Last Friday, at a press conference ahead of this year's PCC, Marsh was able to announce good news on at least two of those fronts: the Hall of Fame was able to raise the funds to pay the charities back what they're owed from last year, and they'll get their checks within the next two weeks.

Asked how the Hall of Fame secured those funds, Marsh replied: "I have a lot of friends." He did not elaborate.

The announcement follows a $300,000 award given near the beginning of Marsh's tenure, which covered the initial investment the charities made but only a chunk of the over $700,000 owed.

Keeping costs in check

Asked what went wrong last year, Marsh explained that the tournament saw "an extreme decline in revenue" and "expenses [that] got completely out of control... I think the upgrades that happened in one year should have been a five year plan." As Marsh repeated several times over the course of the press conference, "you cannot spend money that you don't have."

With this year's PCCC, Marsh resolved to keep costs in check with "serious negotiations" over expense he could potentially lower. He said that he had cut expenses by six figures and was operating the tournament with half the staff, but that spectators "won't even see a difference."

An example: last year, the Springfield Grocery Company Hospitality Tent was behind Hole 18 on the course. "The cost to put that tent behind Hole 18, all the scaffolding, and the generator work, and everything that had to be done with that was a six figure number... I moved it back to the parking lot, where it had been for 25 or 28 years."

The cost-cutting happened amidst a decline in charities willing to keep sponsoring the tournament — from 47 down to 30.

"On [the] business side, I totally understood it," said Marsh, regarding those charities who opted to pull out of the PCCC. "On [the] personal side, I took it personal, because you're not giving me a shot... I put my own self at risk by leaving a strong 29-year career with Price Cutter, a very good job, to take this on. So there wasn't an option of failure."

"I also took it as a challenge— I'll make you regret doing that," Marsh also said. He later went on to explain that for each sponsor that dropped, he cut an equivalent amount from the tournament's expenses. Still, participating this year or not, the Hall of Fame is now even with every participating charity from last year.

Though the 'pay up front, get more back in November' sponsorship structure remains for this year's tournament, Marsh hopes to sit down with the PGA to discuss more significant restructuring of future PCCCs some time in early fall. Though the tournament's future seemed briefly uncertain, he mentioned that Price Cutter and Highland Dairy had both signed five-year extension deals to continue sponsoring the tournament.

The Price Cutter Charity Championship opens this Thursday.