The tournament took more than nine hours to play with groups averaging about 20 minutes on just the 18th green.
The Iowa Class 3A girls golf state championships were contested at River Valley Golf Course in Adel this week, according to a story in the Des Moines Register, and the festivities featured a furious day-two rally in the team race and three playoff holes to decide the individual champion.
Clear Lake rallied from 12 shots back to beat Gilbert and win the team championship, and the school now can claim three team titles in girls golf, the others coming in 2010 and 2012.
But perhaps the biggest story of the day was an outrageous pin placement on the 18th green, which caused players to average quadruple bogey on the hole.
As evidenced in a tweet by a local TV station intern, Jake Brand, the players weren’t given much of a fair shake. Again, these are 3A high school golfers being presented with this challenge, not professionals.
Today at the Girls 3A State Golf Tournament at The River Valley Golf Course in Adel, the average score on hole 18 was a quadruple bogey.
No, the golfers weren't bad, but this had to have been the most unfair pin placement I've ever seen. This slope gave the athletes no chance. pic.twitter.com/F7OyqIjbkO
According to Brand, the tournament took more than nine hours to play with groups averaging about 20 minutes on just the 18th green.
The individual title came down to the third playoff hole, between Newton’s Rylee Heryford and Gilbert’s Eden Lohrbach. The two-shot identical scores of 149 — both shot 75 on Thursday, then 74 on Friday — and Heryford emerged victorious after three playoff holes. She is the first Newton girls golfer to win an individual state title.
Renowned architect A.W. Tillinghast designed and created the course in 1926. It was part of Fort Monmouth.
TINTON FALLS, N.J. — To use a golf analogy, the Monmouth Regional High School golf team is stuck in a sand bunker with no wedge to get out.
On March 4, just days before spring practices were to begin, the local course it uses for practices and games — Suneagles Golf Course in Eatontown, a small town about 10 miles north of Asbury Park — informed the team’s coach that they weren’t going to be allowed to use the course for the season.
Renowned architect A.W. Tillinghast designed and created Suneagles Golf Course in 1926. It was part of Fort Monmouth. The fort was decommissioned in 2011 and its properties are being sold off to private owners.
Head Coach Andrew Wardell is now scrambling to find a new course. A worst-case scenario is they don’t have one and they play all matches on the road or have to cancel the season.
The team has 12 varsity members and its first home match of the season was scheduled for April 7 against St. John Vianney.
What irks Wardell though, is Suneagles’ golf pro informed him that Ranney School, a private school in Tinton Falls, is being allowed to use the course.
Also, Wardell said they could have used more notice that they wouldn’t be invited back.
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Suneagles is owned by Martelli Development. The owner Sal Martelli did not return a call.
Ranney School’s athletic director did not return a call or email.
Wardell said historically, the government let Monmouth Regional use the golf course for no charge. When Martelli Development purchased the course in 2017, it required $2,500 in course fees, which he said the school paid.
When Jersey Shore native Dan Radel is not reporting the news, you can find him in a college classroom where he is a history professor. Reach him @danielradelapp; 732-643-4072; dradel@gannettnj.com.
Modeled after a college setup, Westside High School might have the finest public high school indoor golf practice facility in the country.
Kaitlyn Hanna likes to go into The Swede Center before basketball games to work on her putting. Said it helps with her nerves.
She can also get a few clubs out of her locker during lunch or after her homework is complete at Westside High School in Omaha, Nebraska, and go to work on one of the school’s simulators.
“They’re definitely jealous,” said Hanna of friends who play at rival high schools. “Every once in a while they’ll be like ‘Oh I want to transfer to Westside.’ ”
Inside Westside’s The Swede Center (Photo by Tom Kessler)
And who could blame them? Modeled after what’s often seen on college campuses, Westside is now home to what’s surely one of the finest – if not the finest – public high school indoor golf practice facilities in the country.
“We’re big on just giving every kid opportunities to try new passions,” said Terry Hanna, development director for the Westside Community Schools Foundation and Hanna’s father.
The facility, which was officially dedicated last February, features putting and chipping areas, two hitting bays, a players’ lounge and locker room. It’s situated behind the gym in what was once considered an unusable space. Because so much of the electrical was already in place, the total cost of the project was $350,000.
Kaitlyn, a two-time state champion who has committed to play college golf at Iowa, enjoys reading about the history of the program that lines the walls of the Swede Center. For her part, she constructed a piece of wall art in the shape of a “W” made out of 9,300 golf tees.
The facility was funded entirely by donations – 61 donors in all – and the lead gift came from the Carlson family. Scott Carlson said one of the main reasons they wanted to get involved with the center was to connect an endowed scholarship in their father’s name. That and Merrill “Swede” Carlson loved golf, shooting his age every year from age 69 to 84 at the Field Club.
“When this opportunity came by it just seemed to be a perfect fit for my dad,” said Scott, who attended Westside along with his siblings.
One aspect of the facility that his father would appreciate the most, Scott said, is the way it involves the entire community.
Inside Westside’s The Swede Center (Photo by Tom Kessler)
There are 6,000 students within the district – one high school, one middle school and 10 elementary schools. Youth clinics hosted by members of the girls and boys golf teams at Westside are at the heart of the project’s mission.
In the days following Macy Pate’s mind-blowing round of 57, more good golf has followed. Get to know the high school sophomore from North Carolina.
Jay Allred has been head girls golf coach at Reagan High School in Pfafftown, North Carolina, since the team got started 15 years ago. He volunteered to be an assistant, but when nobody else raised a hand, got promoted to head coach. For the first 18 months on the job, Allred said he picked up Homer Kelley’s “The Golfing Machine” and carried it around like a Baptist minister.
These days Allred, publisher of Triad Golf Today and Triangle Golf Today, mostly carries around packages of Oreos. Have a bad hole? Here’s a cookie. He’s big on fun and doesn’t ask about scores mid-round.
In fact, Allred said he didn’t even know his No. 3 player, Macy Pate, had shot an outrageously low 14-under 57 until her score went up on the scoreboard. Assistant coach Mary Kate Bowman Choat, who played at Appalachian State, kept Pate fueled with brownies.
Macy Pate holds up her 57 card (courtesy photos)
“Gosh, it’s been a lot of fun,” said the engaging Pate nearly one week after that life-changing round. It took a while for the enormity of that 57 to sink in. Pate took the PSAT the next day and came out of testing to an avalanche of messages. She has picked up almost 1,000 followers on Instagram.
Her principal at Reagan offered congrats, as did several teachers and players on the boys’ team. Over the weekend at the AJGA’s Vaughn Taylor Championship, volunteers asked for her autograph.
Pate won that tournament too, by six shots, with rounds of 69-67-73.
“It’s beyond anything I could’ve ever imagined,” said the 16-year-old sophomore, who broke 70 for the first time in a tournament just this year.
Pate isn’t even the best player on Reagan’s team. That honor belongs to senior Morgan Ketchum, a senior who heads to Virginia Tech next fall. Ketchum has been averaging 31 all season. She hits the ball 285 yards off the tee and practiced 90 hours over spring break earlier this year, rising at 5 a.m. to work out. Over the summer, the studious Ketchum learned Morse code.
“I was shocked (Morgan) didn’t get more attention,” said Allred of Ketchum’s college recruitment.
Anna Howerton, a junior who committed to High Point University, rounds out the nucleus of Reagan’s team.
Reagan has the rare opportunity to win two state titles in the span of one calendar year after last year’s event was postponed due to the pandemic. Pate won the individual title in May and led the team to its second state crown and a No. 1 ranking in the country.
They’ll try for a third state title next week on Pinehurst No. 5.
Reagan, winners of 13 consecutive conference championships, regularly rewrites the state record book. Earlier this season, they shot 92 as a team in a nine-hole event, setting a new record with rounds of 28 (Ketchum), 31 (Howerton) and 33 (Pate/Hillary Gong).
Front: Assistant coach Mary Kate Bowman Choat Back row left to right: Morgan Ketchum, Macy Pate, Caroline Shriver, Jay Allred, Anna Howerton, Ella Reed, Ruth Anne Asbill.
The day Pate shot 57 at the Central Piedmont 4A Conference Championship at Bermuda Run West, she hit 15 shots on the range to warm up, mostly talking to her teammates about music and joking with coaches. So much of junior golf is a pressure-cooker. Allred makes sure that enjoyment remains a priority at Reagan.
A relaxed Pate started her round at Bermuda Run West on the seventh hole. She birdied two of the first three and said to her dad, “Well, that was a good start,” on the shuttle ride to the back nine.
Pate would go on to make 10 consecutive birdies from Nos. 14-5. Twice her ball settled into a footprint in a bunker and she got up and down both times. She made most of her birdies from the 8- to 9-foot range.
Her best shot of the day came on the drivable par-4 14th, where it was 260 to the flag and a long carry over water.
Pate looked over at her dad as the ball was in the air and said, “That might be in the hole.”
The ball ended up 20 yards long, but she got up and down for birdie to kickstart that magnificent run.
The par-71 course played to about 4,800 yards. Pate shot 27 on the front and 30 on the back and wore out her wedges. She noted that on Monday, her dad had her wedges bent back to her specs. Her gap wedge in particular had gotten too upright. She practiced with them once before the 57.
Ketchum shot 64 that day and lost by seven shots.
Pate broke the North Carolina High School Athletic Association’s scoring record of 11-under 61 set by Duke’s Gina Kim in 2016 and matched by current LPGA player Jennifer Chang’s 10-under 61 in 2017.
Introduced to the game by her father, Chris, Pate was taught early on by now-retired Wayne Smith at Blowing Rock Country Club near Boone, North Carolina.
“He’s such a good guy,” said Pate. “He’d give me a lesson anytime I needed one.”
It was Smith who introduced Pate to former Wake Forest coach Dianne Dailey, who encouraged Pate to get off the mountain if she wanted to take her game to another level. Dailey knew that the facilities, weather and limited competition in Boone would hold her back.
Last year, Chris and Martha Pate found new jobs in Winston-Salem and moved their daughter to Reagan, where her confidence quickly blossomed. Pate now works with Brad Luebchow, a teaching pro at Maple Chase Golf and Country Club, where six of the nine players on Reagan’s team are members.
Over the summer, Pate won the North Carolina Junior Girls’ Championship followed by a 12-shot victory at the Twin States Junior Girls and a seven-shot triumph at the Carolinas Junior Girls that included a final-round 66.
After knocking on the door at several AJGA events, she collected her first title on that tour a mere five days after that magical 57.
Left to right: Morgan Ketchum, Macy Pate and Anna Howerton.
On Tuesday, Pate and her teammates will play in regionals before trying to defend their title at Pinehurst.
Her biggest goal for 2022: qualify for the U.S. Women’s Open at nearby Pine Needles.
“I think she is going to have her door knocked down,” said Dailey of future college options.
No part of this attention seems to have gone to Pate’s head. The ball she used to shoot 57 is sitting inside a trophy in the family living room. The scorecard is on the kitchen table.
Did she ever get nervous?
Not really. Excited more than anything over a two-foot putt that meant she could par in and shoot 59.
And then she thought, “Might as well try to go even lower.”
This, as you can imagine, easily won Pate the individual title at the Central Piedmont 4-A Conference championships.
On the par-71, 4,800-yard layout, Pate birdied 14 of the 18 holes, setting the North Carolina High School Athletic Association’s scoring record. Her 57 wasn’t just the girls record — it also beat the lowest boys score in NCHSAA history.
“I started on No. 7 and got off to a good start by making birdie on three of the first four holes,” she said. “But I just kept hitting my wedge shots really close, and my putter was hot, so it was a great combination.”
Thanks to her 57, and a few teammate scores of 64 and 69, the Reagan High School Raiders took home the conference championship trophy.
Days after her USGA debut, Melanie Walker earned USA Today’s highest honor for a high school athlete.
USA TODAY’s best female high school golfer in the nation was sitting at a gas station when she learned she’d received the highest honor for a high school athlete.
A broken phone had sent Melanie Walker’s family in search of a substitute during a tournament week in Pinehurst, North Carolina, and on the way back, the 17-year-old had USA TODAY’s High School Sports Awards show livestream playing in the car.
“It’s really exciting,” she said. “It feels very impressive to be ranked that high… to be given such a big honor. It’s crazy because you see all how many big names were also on that list and then being chosen above them.”
Indeed, Walker, an incoming senior at Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax County, Virginia, hasn’t finished outside the top 10 in three trips to Virginia’s state high school girls championship. She won the tournament as a junior.
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In Virginia, men and women compete together in high school golf. Consider Walker the impetus behind Walker Robinson Secondary’s recent rise on the state scene. When she was a freshman, the team didn’t get past the first level of districts. Walker decided to do something about it and started organizing winter practices once a week.
“I sent out an email chain,” she said. “I tried to encourage once per week on Tuesday for everybody to come out and practice. We got middle schoolers that came out and did it and they were able to come up this past year. They were some of the reasons we did really well. . . . It really was nice to see the accomplishments pay off because I don’t think I would have gone as far as I did without my team putting in the practice.”
Typically, golf is a fall sport in Virginia but because of COVID-19, it was delayed to the spring last school year. At the height of the pandemic, Walker found it a little difficult to get excited about golf without tournaments to play.
“It was hard to go out and motivate yourself – you could spend a whole lot of time watching Netflix or something,” she said.
But Walker, who lives 20 minutes outside Washington D.C., did note how much easier it was to get from place to place as traffic lightened.
Walker competed on the AJGA throughout the fall of 2020, and in 2021, qualified for two AJGA invitationals – the Annika Invitational (T47) and the Rolex Girls Junior Championship (T45).
By June, she had qualified for her first USGA championship, the U.S. Girls’ Junior, by coming in second at her qualifier at Silver Lake (Ohio) Country Club. Last month at Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, Maryland, Walker fired rounds of 74-79 and missed the cut. She took a quadruple bogey on her third-to-last hole after getting stuck in a bush and couldn’t recover.
“It was a good learning experience and two weeks later I won my first AJGA. I learned how to grow from it,” she said of a subsequent trip to the AJGA Stan Utley and Mid-America Youth Golf Foundation Junior Championship.
As she enters her senior year, she has her eye on college golf and is sill talking to coaches. Walker is already thinking about how to build on the USGA foundation she’s now acquired. She’s eyeing what she calls the quadruple threat for 2022, which is what she describes as qualifying for the U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball, U.S. Women’s Open, U.S. Girls’ Junior and U.S. Women’s Amateur.
“Once you get that breakthrough,” she said, referencing this year’s U.S. Girls’ Junior start, “it might be more feasible.”
Lance Christensen is one of South Dakota’s best high school golfers. COVID-19 almost wiped out his senior season. But he’s back.
Ask Lance Christensen why he loves golf and he’ll paint you a picture. “It’s such a special game,” the Little Wound senior says, “being outdoors, smelling the fresh-cut grass, birds chirping — all that stuff. I could go on and on.”
That passion — inherited from his father and swing coach, former Bennett County standout Lance Christensen Sr. — comes with a genuine appreciation for the opportunities he has to play.
Hailing from Kyle, a town of about 850 people on the eastern half of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Christensen lives about an hour from the nearest golf course. When he wants to play, he has to drive 49 miles south to Gordon, Nebraska or about 90 miles west towards the Rapid City Area.
“The kid’s like me. We’ll drive anywhere as long as we can golf,” Lance Sr. said of his son, who logged 5,200 miles traveling to meets last year. “When he gets there, there’s that excitement when he steps on the course. That’s one thing I’ve always noticed in raising him. He can’t wait to get that next opportunity.”
Over the years, Christensen’s dedication and passion have melded with his natural ability and relentlessly competitive drive to establish him as one of the state’s elite players.
Last season, he became the second golfer from a reservation school to win an individual state championship in South Dakota history (Corey Jensen, Todd County, Rosebud Reservation, 1998), and the first to do so from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
On Monday, Christensen began his quest to become the first repeat Class A state champion since 2010-11 (Ryan Medhaug, Sisseton), firing an opening round 86 at Southern Hills Golf Course in Hot Springs, his home course.
Stephanie Scott is the first girl ever at her high school to record an ace and she did so on the first swing she ever took in competition.
Stephanie Scott was surprisingly calm walking to the opening hole for the first match of her high school career. Her first golf competition ever, actually. The Otsego (Michigan) High freshman was playing in a dual match against rival Plainwell, and all 15 girls on her team were in action on Monday in a shotgun start.
Scott’s round began on the par-3 eighth hole. She pulled a 7-iron from her bag for the 90-yard shot and aimed toward a pin that was cut behind a bunker. It didn’t feel like that good of a strike to Scott, and the marshy area in front of tee box kept her from seeing where it ended up. But the yelling around the green told the remarkable tale.
Scott, 14, had one-hopped it in the hole for an ace.
“I was just frozen,” she told Golfweek by phone after school on Friday.
Her mom, Robin, and her grandfather were by the ninth hole when it happened, trying to find their way around Lake Doster Golf Club. Her father, Matt, didn’t see it go in either.
“I gave her a high-five and a hug,” said head coach Matt Rayman, “and I think I scared her to death because she didn’t know what was going on.”
Stephanie had never carded a par or a birdie in practice. She was going to walk up to the hole, pick up her ball and move on to the next tee before Rayman told her stop and take some pictures.
She shot 53 that day, breaking 60 for the first time. Rayman was so caught up in the excitement of the day that he still has no idea which team won the overall match. Stephanie is the first girl in Otsego history to record an ace, and yes, she did keep the ball.
Rayman has coached high school golf at Otsego for more than two decades and started the girls’ program 11 years ago.
“I’ve seen 22 years of freshmen dribble it into the weeds, skull it over the green, whiff completely or whatever it may be,” Rayman told mlive.com, “so for that shot to be executed to perfection, it was awesome.”
Stephanie knew that aces were rare in golf, but she’s been shocked by the amount of media attention her accomplishment has received. She’s been interviewed by four local television stations and two newspapers, finding the exercise more nerve-racking than the golf shots.
“I’m enjoying the game a lot more now,” said Stephanie, who first picked up a club around age 7 but didn’t really start playing the game until this summer when she decided to play a fall sport. She also plays club soccer now and hopes to compete on the high school team in the spring.
Rayman is director of golf at Lake Doster Golf Club, a semi-private course that hosts both Otsego and Plainwell, and said that family memberships are up 200 percent since COVID-19 hit.
“We have so many kids playing, families playing,” he said. “I cannot keep up with the range.”
No telling how many more will be inspired to pick up a club after one freshman’s extraordinary shot.
Tom Lehman’s son Sean is on his high school golf team, filling his time until the delayed football season in Arizona gets underway.
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Tom Lehman’s sons would tag along with him on golf courses, some of the most famous in the world, growing up.
But no pressure. He allowed them to explore their love in multiple sports.
For Sean Lehman, a pretty good quarterback, he turned his love of football into becoming one of the state of Arizona’s top high school cornerbacks.
He had a breakthrough game against Phoenix Horizon High School, three weeks after being sidelined by an injury, making stop after stop and pass breakup after pass breakup, as a junior for Scottsdale Notre Dame Prep.
But, as everybody saw last spring, there was always a chance that COVID-19 could blindside football this fall.
So that’s why you found Sean Lehman teeing off the golf season with his Notre Dame teammates at the Ocotillo Golf Club in Chandler, a Phoenix suburb.
This is his first high school golf season. This also marks the high school sports competition in more than five months.
“I’m excited,” Sean said. “Every year, football and golf were the same season. As of right now, football is so questionable. My coaches are like, ‘Sean, you need to go for golf.’ I was, ‘Sounds good.'”
Sean Lehman, a two-sport athlete at Scottsdale Notre Dame Prep in Arizona, is the son of pro golfer Tom Lehman.Photo by Rob Schumacher/The Arizona Republic via USA TODAY NETWORK
The official start date to practice for football is Monday.
“He has the talent to succeed in both sports,” Notre Dame football coach George Prelock said. “He will be able to manage it because is focused, and he is driven to be the best he can be.”
Coronavirus infection numbers have been decreasing in Arizona. But the way COVID-19 has played with everybody’s head since March, there is no telling if and when a spike will blow the season off the map.
Golf, it appears, is COVID-proof
Players can easily physically distance themselves away from each other. They’re only touching their own clubs. They’re not picking up sand rakes and hole pins. And, this season, the AIA is using electronic scoring. So no need to touch the scorecard and pencil in your scores.
Even when COVID first hit Arizona in the spring, most golf courses in the Valley remained open.
“I definitely encouraged him to talk to the coaches first,” said Tom Lehman. “The start of the (football) season was pushed back to October (Oct. 2 is Notre Dame’s first game). That opens a window where he can play golf. He might as well take a run at, as long as the coaches are OK with it. As the season progresses, we’ll see if it works.”
Sean Lehman, like his older brother Thomas, has a natural swing on the golf course, helped by imitating their father on the course.
For a week in 1997, Tom Lehman, now 61, was the No. 1-ranked player in the world. He won one major, the Open Championship, in 1996. He was named Player of the Year on three PGA Tours: the regular tour, the then-Web.com Tour and the PGA Tour Champions.
Thomas Lehman Jr., who played both football and baseball at Notre Dame Prep, didn’t pick up a golf club much in high school until he got to college. After a red-shirt year at TCU, he walked on Cal Poly’s golf team and his game took off. He recently turned pro.
To break COVID boredom this summer, Sean would golf.
He gained 60 yards in his drive since last year just be growing and getting stronger. He’s found a way to control his new-found power. Sean was in Minnesota for two months with his dad this summer, playing in tournaments. He won one small tournament in Alexandria. He said he would practice football there, thinking maybe he would stay in Minnesota if Arizona didn’t have high school football this fall.
“Imitation is one of the biggest ways they learned as a kid,” Tom Lehman said of his sons.
Football in the Lehman blood
Tom was a high school quarterback in Minnesota, where he learned the game from his father Jim, who played running back at St. John’s and in the NFL with the Baltimore Colts.
Sean said it’s easy having his father watch him play football. At the stadium, Tom isn’t always the ultra-composed figure he displays on the golf course. He’ll be part of the chain crew at Notre Dame.
“My dad, I think he personally likes watching us play football better,” Sean said. “He loves it. He got kicked out of a game last year when he was on the chain gang. He gets into it.”
Sean said his father makes it a priority to make Friday night games even during his golf season.
“He’ll fly in for a night and fly back so he can watch the game,” Sean said.
Playing golf at Notre Dame could be different. Sean Lehman isn’t so sure how it will be with his dad watching him drive the ball.
“For golf, I don’t like him watching,” Sean said. “It’s a lot of pressure. I show up on the first tee. I don’t practice. These guys have all been working on it. I’ll go out and they’ll say, ‘That’s Tom Lehman’s kid. He must be insane.’
“Of course, I want to live up to it. But I don’t know.”
Sean Lehman, a two-sport athlete at Scottsdale Notre Dame Prep in Arizona, is the son of pro golfer Tom Lehman.Photo by Rob Schumacher/The Arizona Republic via USA TODAY NETWORK
Tom Lehman has always taught Sean on the golf course with the main advice being, “Keep your cool.”
Tom calls himself one of many parents with an opinion, who wants to see his sons do well. No different than any other parent.
But he realizes his son feels pressure on the golf course when he shows up, because he knows people are looking at him with, ‘That’s Tom Lehman’s kid, he must be good.”
Tom Lehman reminds Sean to just enjoy each moment he has in sports while he can.
“To play the sports you love, now is the time to play them,” Tom Lehman said.
