9-Hole Golf 2015 History Report
Chairman: Barry Brown
Assistant Chairman: Phil Philpot
Advisor & Stats: Dick Brooks, Advisor: Bill Bargenquast
The number of nine hole golf courses in the neighborhood was reduced when one of our regular venues, Pine Meadows in Martinez closed down, leaving only Diablo Hills Golf Course in Walnut Creek and Buchanan Field in Concord as viable nine hole courses. Unfortunately Buchanan Field is not a very cooperative venue for the number of players we have every week so we decided as a group to play all of our weekly rounds at Diablo Hills. This turned out to be a good decision as a new group has now emerged the “Travelling 9-hole golf group” who will visit other courses outside of our immediate vicinity.
2015 has been a very good year for the 9-hole group. For the period January 1 through November 1st we had 59 players of which 54 played 6 or more rounds and 12 guests. This constituted 1070 rounds of golf with only one day when play was rained out.
The Don Atwater Invitational (the DAI) was held on June 4th at the Northwood golf course at Monte Rio along the Russian River. This was a beautiful setting amongst the redwoods and we had a great turnout, 44 golfers from our nine-hole group and also the couples golf group. Phil Philpot who chaired this event did a wonderful job of not only organizing this tournament but also a great dinner afterwards at Negris Italian restaurant in Occidental. We are planning to have the 29th DAI in 2016!
We had our 3rd annual championship tournament at the end of October with competitions for low gross and net scores for individuals and four man teams. Individual handicaps were assigned based on actual scoring at the course and the teams were made up from the stats kept by our statistical guru, Dick Brooks. These proved to be very accurate as the spread in scores was just a few strokes in both gross and net scores. Winners were presented with suitable certificates.
We anticipate continuing being a popular activity in 2016 and welcome all new Branch 8 members and any present members to come and join the group every Wednesday at Diablo Hills Golf course in Walnut Creek.
