The curtain came down on the 21st season of the McLennan Ross Junior Tour, Presented by Crowe MacKay, at Wolf Creek Golf Resort.
There were 118 players in attendance from all over Alberta competing for the opportunity to add “Tour Champion” to their resume, or even just celebrate the end of another summer of junior golf with their friends.
The man behind the tour since day one, Dunc Mills, was there of course and he had this to say about how the final tournmanet of the season played out.
Thanks Dunc!
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Wolf Creek is firmly entrenched in the Top 100 courses in Canada for a good reason. It’s not super long by today’s standards of 300+ yard drives, but that’s never been the course’s calling card. Strategy, planning and great putting always will help get you around “The Wolf”, but when the wind blows like it did yesterday, all bets are off. For a comparison, I looked at the 2015 results from the Tour Championship, held on a sunny, virtually windless day. Twenty-six players broke 80 last year. Nick Vandermey and Sharmaine Rapisura won with scores of 69 and 75 respectively. This year, with a steady south wind that makes the course play even harder, only ten kids in total posted a score with a 7 at the front, and 74 got you into a playoff for the boys’ title.
Reid Woodman of Blackhawk, in his swan song as a junior golfer, and Max Murchison of Calgary, who two weeks ago finished T5th in the country at the Canadian Junior, hit the finish line tied with their 74s and headed out to #15 on The Old Course for a sudden-victory playoff. The clubhouse virtually emptied of the other competitors who went out to watch. Off the tee, it looked like ‘advantage Murchison’ as he bombed his drive way down to the bottom of the hill while Woodman was in the right rough, and when Max put his second shot about 25 feet above the hole with Reid missing the green left, the engraver in the clubhouse was almost ready to start etching his name onto the trophy. (Little bit of an Open reference there!)
But golf is a funny game. Reid made a tremendous flop shot to about 3 feet out of the rough, and Max left his downhill birdie putt only slightly inside Reid’s length for par. Well you know where THIS is going, as Reid poured his par putt in and when Max’s tricky downhill slider slipped by the hole, we had ourselves a new Tour Champion. Woodman shot 74 last year as well, but his score in 2015 was only good for T3 behind Vandermey’s 69.Murchison has two more years of Tour eligibility left, so we might see his name on the trophy yet. Max was T6 last year.
In the Junior Girls’ division, Cassidy Laidlaw of Bearspaw had to be considered one of the pre-tournament favorites, based both on her overall strong play in provincial and national events this summer, as well as her 8-birdie , 4-under par 68 effort at Canmore in late July, which tied the Tour’s all-time scoring record for junior girls. Laidlaw didn’t disappoint, firing a steady score of 80, an excellent result in the demanding conditions. The host club’s Shaye Leidenius finished only 2 shots in arrears, as the two players battled back and forth over their back 9, playing in the same foursome along with defending Tour Champion Sharmaine Rapisura of Canyon Meadows and Daphne Rantung of Silver Springs. Rantung finished 4th with an 85, one shot behind her club mate Lauren Cheng’s 84 in third, as this girls ‘feature group’ finished 1-2-4-6. I should handicap this well at the race track!
This was a bit of an unusual year on the Tour, with many of the best performances over the summer coming from players with substantial junior eligibility left. Young players like Kaiden Nicholson of Edmonton CC, Ethan de Graaf of Royal Mayfair, Elias Theodossopoulos of Pinebrook, Cole Ruelling of Lewis Estates, Jace Shannon from Forestburg, Cole Bergheim of Red Deer, Jenna Bruggeman of the Derrick, Brooke Brezovski of Sturgeon Valley, and Jayla Kucy of Camrose really starting to show significant improvement and firing some outstanding scores. This list doesn’t even include 14-year-old Ethan Choi of Pincher Creek whose been so good for so long already, he seems like he’s 14, going on 24. Choi finished 2nd in last year’s Tour Championship at 13, and ‘slipped’ all the way to T4th this year with a 77. What I’m saying is that I think Alberta Junior Golf in general looks to be well-positioned for years to come with this crop of fine young players coming up through the Alberta Golf junior development program. Hundreds of kids who played all summer on the Tour didn’t earn the privilege of teeing it up yesterday, so everyone listed here is a winner in my books
