Nick Mansell has resigned as president of the Bermuda Golf Association, The Royal Gazette can reveal.

Mansell stepped down because he believed the BGA was heading in a “different direction” and therefore felt it “didn’t make sense” for him to continue in his role.

“I just felt that the BGA was going off in a direction that I didn’t feel suited the mandate of the BGA,” he said. “I just couldn’t see myself staying on board and leading something I felt was going in a different direction.

“If I couldn’t put the focus into what I was doing with the BGA then it just didn’t make sense to continue that. If everybody felt strongly about taking a slightly different direction then I wasn’t going to hold back from that and it made no sense having one person who might be antagonistic on the board. We’ve tried very hard over the last few years to actually build up the stature of the BGA in the Island and I felt we have made some leaps and bounds with that.”

It is understood that Andrew Woodworth will serve as the BGA’s acting president until the BGA hold their next annual general meeting.

Woodworth could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Mansell stepped down from his post in October amid a difference of opinion over the BGA’s reluctance to hold this year’s Bermuda Goodwill Pro Am after suffering a $19,000 loss running the previous event.

Mansell was advised by fellow BGA board member Chris Brough in an e-mail that the BGA “are not in a position to take on” the tournament in its current form. Brough expressed concerns that running the tournament presented a conflict of interest for the BGA. He said in the e-mail that running the tournament put a major strain on the BGA’s limited financial and manual resources — resources he felt could be put to use elsewhere. “My concern is that we are putting the BGA’s eggs in the wrong basket,” Brough wrote. “We also need to build the local major events and golf development.”

Mansell added: “There was definitely some difference of opinion with the running of the Goodwill and I fully understand the part about the BGA not willing to take a financial hit. Funding is not as easy to get nowadays so you have to watch the purse strings.”

Mansell managed to secure an anonymous sponsor “willing to underwrite any loss with the presented budget” to finance the event but was unable to persuade his BGA colleagues to come on board.

“We had actually come up with a model that would virtually not put any loss on the BGA so I kind of felt we were in a strong position to run it,” Mansell said.

It’s understood there had been exconcerns over the unknown sponsor who had agreed to cover any losses, whose identity Mansell never disclosed. “The sponsor wished to remain totally anonymous,” Mansell explained. “It was some personal sponsorship we had found and I presented information to them [BGA board] stating we had this personal backer and they just didn’t feel comfortable with that.”

After stepping down as president Mansell and BGA secretary Susie Marshall formed a new company, Tee to Green, that ran this year’s Bermuda Goodwill Pro Am in the absence of the BGA.

“We had to form the different company because obviously the Government funds [sponsors Department of Tourism] just couldn’t really go to an individual so we had to have a company formed,” Mansell added.