By Kimberly Wilson ·Updated April 29, 2026 < /> Getting your Trinity Audio player ready… Golf has always been clear about who it was built for.
The country clubs, the dress codes, the long-running sense that certain people were always welcome while others were merely being accommodated: all of it kept Black players at arm’s length from a sport many of them genuinely love. The Social Golf Association, a Black-owned, Black-led nonprofit out of Washington, D.C., started in 2023 with a simple premise: stop waiting for the sport to make room and build the community yourself.
In practice, that looks like tournaments, community scrambles, country club brunches, and a flagship seasonal event that has become something of a Thursday night institution in Northeast D.C.: Range Night at Langston Golf Course.
On a given night it draws around 250 people across every skill level and profession, Black-owned food trucks lining the driving range, music going, people who have never held a club standing next to players who have been at it for years, with nobody particularly bothered about which is which. In a city where, as co-founder Yvesner Zamar puts it, “every drink, every dinner, every breakfast, every interaction with a person usually comes with some hidden strings,” Range Night has become, for many Black Washingtonians, one of the few spaces where showing up is all that’s required.
The organization was founded by Cirilo Manego III, Yvesner Zamar, Colby Vaughn, and Shallum Atkinson. “Golf never really had a participation problem,” co-founder Cirilo Manego said. “People were always playing golf.” The gap, both founders will tell you, was community, the kind that felt like home.
Manego’s uncle caddied on courses during segregation where he was not allowed to compete using his dominant hand. “He taught himself to play left-handed,” Manego said. “And eventually, he went back and beat those same people, on those same courses he once carried bags.” He never went pro. “But he did what was necessary.” That history is what SGA is building on. “We’re not showing up as guests of this game,” Manego said. “We’re shaping what it looks like.”
Zamar’s relationship with Langston predates SGA entirely. He took his first swing at the range there and, before the organization existed, started a golf league at the course in honor of Lee Elder, the first Black golfer to compete in the Masters and later a steward of Langston itself. “I never got the chance to meet him,” Zamar said, “but I think about him often in the work I do. And I hope he’d be proud of how we’re continuing to build community through golf.”
Washington is a city where even the people who are off the clock are never really “off the clock.” Social gatherings double as informal “what do you do?” interviews and every new connection comes with a digital business card somewhere close behind (the new thing is a Blinq, actually, for the aunties and uncs out there). You’d be surprised that finding a room where nobody wants anything from you is genuinely harder than it should be. “You don’t have to come as your profession. You could just be,” Zamar said.
Making that feel effortless takes more work than it looks like. Every event is built with real intentionality, from vendor outreach to the physical layout of the space, all calibrated so people walk in and feel nothing but welcome.
Zamar put it in terms of a chef and a kitchen: “Anybody can make food, but when a chef is out there and looks like a work of art, it’s because the chef has this kitchen shut up properly so he could use all this tools.” The question the organization returns to before and after every event is whether people are having fun. Given that people keep coming back in a city where loyalty to any one organization is not guaranteed, the answer seems to be yes. And increasingly, the people coming back are Black women.
More than half of SGA’s community are now Black women, largely between 25 and their early 40s. Golf has spent decades projecting one image of itself, but the people actually picking up clubs tell a different story. And it’s not just a D.C. thing. Women are the fastest-growing demographic in golf, and Black women are leading that. SGA is, for a lot of those women, the first place golf has felt like it was actually for them. “It’s not about what you do for somebody,” Manego said, “but it’s how you make them feel. People remember that.”
Belonging costs something too, and the founders know it. Getting good at golf and going somewhere with it costs, on average, $40,000 to $50,000 a year in tournament fees, travel, and equipment alone. SGA’s Fairway Fund, the nonprofit arm of the organization, focuses on junior golfers, HBCUs, and developmental players. By 2027 the goal is one million dollars raised and reinvested. Day-to-day, memberships start at $11.99 a month and a partnership with Second Swing, a verified used-club vendor, handles the equipment end for beginners.
“We’re not leaving anybody out,” Manego said. “We’re not leaving any stone unturned.” On July 1, SGA will make that tangible during Essence Festival of Culture weekend in New Orleans, by partnering with the Sapphire Golf Tour, the first all-Black women’s professional golf developmental tour, to raise funds.
“In five years, wherever there are Social Golfers, there is SGA,” Manego said. “And we all have a little Social Golfer in us.”
The post At Courses Where Black Players Once Fought To Tee Off, This Black-Led Golf Collective Is Proving The Sport Was Always Ours appeared first on Essence.