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Taupō golf side breaks drought

The Taupō Golf Club senior men's side has broken a 25-year-old bogey.

The Taupō Golf Club men’s senior pennants team (L to R) Max Stairmand, Ollie Derby, Jason McIntosh, Travis Delich, Ricky Mallasch and Sam Heenan.

On Sunday the Taupō Golf Club’s senior men’s team broke a 25-year drought to win the Bay of Plenty Senior Pennants Trophy on home soil.

While team member Travis Delich says he didn’t realise to begin with how long it had been since Taupō last had its name on the trophy, one team member, Jason McIntosh, was actually in that 2000 team as an 18-year-old.

The rest of the team, Sam Heenan, Ollie Derby, Max Stairmand and captain Ricky Mallasch overcame a Rotorua side in Sunday’s final at the Taupō Golf Club, though Delich says their semifinal against Ohope a couple of weeks earlier in Mount Maunganui had been a much tougher match.

Fourteen teams from around the Bay of Plenty competed in the pennant competition – a team’s match play event run over a nine-week period.

During round robin play sides accumulate points with a bonus point for any team win (when a side scores more than half the six points available in a match) before the top four sides compete in knockout semis and then finals.

While it is essentially six guys playing six guys from another team, there can be a bit of gamesmanship or savvy captaincy coming in, says Delich.

“You normally put your best player at number one but some teams, depending on who they are playing, will move players around strategically…

“We’ve had a core group of guys for four or five years where we’ve been trying to win this thing and keep coming up short.”

This time though the Taupō side coped with the added atmosphere and pressure, says Delich.

 “We’re not like PGA tour players so we don’t normally have caddies. Everyone had caddies and there was support on both sides. People following you around. Again it’s like you’re used to playing golf on a Saturday, but this is like a bit more high pressure because literally there’s a bunch of people standing around watching the game… for someone like me this is the pinnacle of my golf because I’m never going to be Tiger Woods and you don’t often get the opportunity to play in front of a lot of people, so it was pretty cool out there.”

The team is now hoping to move up to championship division, where you get ex pro players and “the elite of the elite in New Zealand”, says Delich, but which will create an opening for other fellow club members to come up the ranks into the vacant space.

Though the move up might not mean much relief for any the ‘golf widow’ wives and girlfriends.

Says Delich: ”Because we’re the furthest team away on some days we have to get up at 5.30am in the morning to be on the van at 6am to drive to Tauranga or even earlier to go to Opotiki, and then we have to play 18 holes of golf and get into a van and drive back. So, we have some grumpy wives. But it’s a thing everyone commits to for nine weeks…”

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