The American Junior Golf Association tends to celebrate long weekends with tournament opportunities. As this weekend’s AJGA Simplify Boys Championship at Carlton Woods in The Woodlands, Texas, approaches, the AJGA has added two more similar championships.
This marks the first time since 2007 that boys stroke-play invitationals – which draw the deepest fields on the AJGA schedule – have been added to the AJGA lineup.
The organization announced on Wednesday that it would host the Team TaylorMade Invitational on May 29-31, 2021. Top juniors will spend Memorial Day weekend at Streamsong Resort’s Blue Course in remote Bowling Green, Florida.
Streamsong Blue lands in the top 20 on Golfweek’s Best 2020 list of top resort courses and has never hosted an AJGA event before. The U.S. Golf Association hosted the second U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball at Streamsong Resort in 2016. The Florida State Golf Association frequently uses it for a championship site, and the inaugural Golfweek Streamsong Amateur was played on the Blue Course in December.
Along with the Team TaylorMade Invitational, the AJGA last week added the Jack Burke Jr. Invitational to the August schedule. The 54-hole boys event will be played at Champions Golf Club Cypress Creek course, where the U.S. Women’s Open was played in December.
Interestingly, the event, to be played Aug. 3-6, grew from parent support. When four parents of AJGA players posed the question of whether Champions Golf Club ever host an event, the wheels began to turn.
“One of the biggest challenges for junior golf is obtaining high-quality courses for tournaments,” said Chris Spaulding, one of those parents, in an AJGA release. “We all have junior golfers and we know this first hand. We thought it would be excellent if an AJGA Invitational were held at Champions and on the Cypress Creek course. We knew that it would be a very special event and, as we knew would be the case, when we raised the possibility with Robin Burke and Bret Nutt, Champions immediately got behind hosting the event.”
The Jack Burke Jr. Invitational is named, of course, after the founder of the club – a man who had an illustrious professional career that included the 1956 Masters title. The invitational has no corporate sponsor. Instead, support from Champions Golf Club members will fund the championship in 2021 and beyond.
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