SWCGA Boys Championship

SWCGA Boys Championship Ferndown GC - Wednesday 27 July 2011

The Six Counties Championship got underway at Ferndown Golf Club at 8.10am from both starting points in excellent golfing weather on a course in superb condition. The County were lucky enough to have 14 players taking part; some as formal team members and some as individual entries and the remainder as invitees of the county to fill up an empty tee time. Only six names may be nominated as team members with one additional reserve in case a team member fell ill or had an accident. The best five scores of the nominated six players count as the county’s score for each of the two rounds.

Dorset was up against four strong teams , sharing with Wiltshire the role of underdogs. Some idea of the relative strengths may be gained by totalling the handicaps of each team’s six nominated players: Devon 2, Somerset 3, Gloucestershire 6, Cornwall 9, Wiltshire 13 and Dorset 14. The team nominated for Dorset comprised Robbie Mabb, Harry Mitchell, Harry Mann, Jordan Howlett, George Long and Dominic Knight. Billy-Joe Bugden and Alex Spencer were reserves.

Robbie carded the equal best score of 70 in the morning and Harry Mitchell the third best in the afternoon, also a 70. By comparison in the afternoon Jimmy Mullen and Harrison Greenbury – both of Devon – carded a 66 and 69 respectively.

For the 36 hole totals click here.

Jack Fairhall played in one of the reserve places at very short notice but sadly was ill due to lack of time to eat breakfast but all is well now. Notable in achievements was the 148 total achieved by Ollie Stocks playing off a 6 handicap. With CSS being 72 for both rounds he will certainly be reduced to 5! Well done indeed.

For the final team scores click here.

In compiling their scores one or two of our players had major mishaps that totally changed their final figures. For instance Harry Mann and Dominic Knight had a triple bogey hole in one of their rounds. Had they both merely made par our team total would have been six strokes better immediately. Similarly, both Harry Mitchell and Robbie Mabb double bogeyed the 18^th in their second rounds; again a par in both cases would have lowered our team total by another 4 shots. Those changes alone would have brought a cut of ten strokes from our team total giving Dorset first place in the team championship!

The individual honours went to the Devon pair of Jimmy Mullen and Harrison Greenbury who returned total scores of 138 and 141 respectively, representing excellent golf for Devon. All in all some good golf was played and an excellent result achieved compared with our rather poorer efforts in the last few years. It just shows that we can do better and I am sure we shall.

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