Ever since the high school golf season got under way some eight weeks ago, I”ve renewed my annual visits to various golf courses throughout the state. My Kelseyville High School golf team plays a fairly aggressive non-league schedule, and as I often have told others in the know, I don”t necessarily schedule opponents. I schedule quality golf courses.
In late March the team traveled to Southern California and played at LaPurisima in Lompoc. LaPurisima has hosted various levels of Q School and the year it did the finals, the medalist was Scott Verplank. It is one tough layout. We also went to Chalk Mountain in Atascadero. There is a strange ambiance to that course as at one end of the site sits Atascadero State Hospital, a maximum-security penitentiary. It provides a most imposing presence just behind the 17th green.
I always like to take the team to the Bay Area and expose it to the big-city kids and that usually means playing a tournament at San Leandro”s Tony Lema Golf Course. Lema sits along San Francisco Bay and offers great views of the The City and downtown Oakland. Just north of Tony Lema is the old Lew Galbraith Golf Course, which was closed, used as a dumping ground for harbor dredging, and then completely redesigned by Johnny Miller and Fred Bliss. The course was renamed the Metropolitan Golf Links. Adding to its ambiance is the fact it sits adjacent to Oakland International Airport. To the west is the Bay.
Metropolitan is the home golf course of the University of California at Berkeley. Cal won the NCAA Division title in golf in 2005. A giant picture of the team at the awards ceremony fills a large portion of the hall outside the pro shop. The all-grass driving range is just beyond the first tee and approximately 25 percent of it is cordoned off, solely for the use of the Cal golf team.
A similar situation exists in nearby Petaluma at Adobe Creek Golf Club, a Robert Trent Jones II design that has been open since 1989. Adobe Creek is the home course for Kelseyville”s main conference rival, St. Vincent High School. We play a varsity and a junior varsity match there each year and the beauty of the facility is a neat perk for the high school linksters.
Adobe Creek also serves as the home course for Sonoma State University. SSU has had a golf program for just five years, and yet in that little amount of time, the Seawolves have made themselves into a Division II program of note. Earlier this week, Sonoma State shot a very impressive 6-under-par team total of 858 (low four scores each day for 54 holes) to win the California Collegiate Athletic Association championship at Hunters Ranch, beating perennial Division II powerhouse Stanislaus State.
Val Verhunce, the PGA professional at Adobe Creek, is SSU”s coach and he also doubles as the women”s coach. Verhunce, a Chicago kid who played at the University of South Florida, was the high school golf coach at St. Vincent some seven years ago. He is the director of instruction at Adobe Creek, an instructor at ESPN Golf Schools, and is an all-around great guy. His top player is Jarin Todd, the 2007 Division II player of the year.
Verhunce and his fine program were given a tip of the hat by the NCAA when they named Adobe Creek as the site for the NCAA Division II Super Regional. It will run from May 5-7 and includes the top 16 ranked teams in the West. The top five teams advancing out of Adobe Creek head to the Division II nationals in Houston at the end of the month. That”s heady stuff for the local state university.
About 30 miles north of Adobe Creek is the Windsor Golf Club, which is another cool site for high school golfers from the Coastal Mountain Conference. Windsor was one of the original venues for the AAA level Ben Hogan Tour, which morphed into the Nike Tour and currently goes by the name of Nationwide Tour. Former British Open champion David Duval holds the Windsor course record. Every time we go to Windsor, I retell the story of the unknown kid from Dardanelle, Arkansas. He snap-hooked his tee shot on the par-4 15th hole out of bounds into the adjacent cemetery. The kid re-teed and this time he drove the green, a mere 340 yards away. One putt later he had the most unorthodox of pars. The young unknown pro was named John Daly.
While it sometimes drives my players crazy, I always throw a little golf architectural history into our pre-round preparation. I figure that if you know who the architect was, you can get a pretty good feeling for what the course is like. For instance, everything about the designs of the aforementioned Robert Trent Jones II is big, big, big. Big greens, big fairways, big bunkers and big water hazards. Jones is the designer of Adobe Creek and the Bodega Harbour Golf Links.
Jack Fleming, the prot?g? of Alister Mackenzie at Cypress Point, Augusta National, Pasatiempo and the Meadow Club, is quite prolific in the minds of the local high school golfers. Among his golf course credits are Adams Springs on Cobb Mountain, Mount St. Helena in Calistoga, the Meadowwood Resort in St. Helena, and Oakmont Country Club in Santa Rosa”s Valley of the Moon.
Willie Watson, the designer of Ukiah Municipal, also has the Olympic Club on his golfing resume. Bliss and Miller are the designers of Windsor. John Harbottle did the Tony Lema course and the late Robert Muir Graves was the visionary behind Chalk Mountain and Sea Ranch.
I”m not sure I”ve played all the golf I would like to this spring. I spend a lot of my time running high school events, doing scoreboards as well as the first-tee introductions. Nonetheless, it”s been another good spring. I”ve put a lot of miles on the old golf team van and I”ve been to a lot of great places with tons of history and tradition.
