First NCGA Junior Tour Event
The first NCGA Junior Tour event is underway this weekend at Poppy Hills Golf Course. 120 players teed off yesterday in 5 flights. The low score of the day was a 71 by Michael Weaver from Fresno. The low score for the 15-18 year old girls was Kercia Brakel from Acampo. In the 14-15 boys bracket Kraig McLeod from Pebble Beach leads with a 78. The 12-13 year old boys are lead by Carlos Briones, San Lorenzo and Christopher Petefish, Danville with 80. The 12-14 year old girls are lead by Mariko Yamaguchi Tumangen from San Jose with a 73. The youngest flights of boys and girls were playing shorter tees. Results.
Six groups were cited for slow play after their first 9 holes and two of those were upheld after appeal leading to 8 penalties on the day. This was the first experience with the group pace of play policy for many players and most of them dealt with it very well.
One unfortunate incident occurred when a player who had finished her round and turned in her scorecard was discovered to have 15 clubs in her bag and had to be disqualified for signing a card without the penalty be applied. Her father later said that they had bought her two new clubs for Christmas and hadn’t thought about counting them. Our starter did remind all players to count their clubs on the first tee and she had, but obviously she missed one.
John, do you mind commenting on the decision to have three age groups for boys and two for girls? I presume it’s related to the expected field sizes, but what other sort of issues were discussed when determining what the age group breakdowns should be?
Good luck with the events.
Andrew,
We did look at the size of the fields and if you look at our first two events, you will see that we really couldn’t have more than 2 girls flights. We could have gone with 2 boys flights also, but we wanted to have more kids have a chance to get win a medal.
The age groups were pretty much the same as most other associations and tours use.
We did not restrict the size of the flights so if a lot of girls had entered, they would have gotten to play. Once the field got full, I did look to balance flights to have multiples of 4 in each flight for pairing purposes. Therefore, some withdrawals were replaced with kids from different age groups or genders until the balance worked out.