Last Thursday, Tim Garvin and the South Fork Country Club in Amagansett played host to 66 young golfers and 22 pros from all over the Island who played in the Met PGA Long Island Pro Junior championship, a best-ball competition contested by foursomes (one pro and three juniors) that wound up with Meadow Brook, whose pro was Matt Dobyns, and Piping Rock, with Nick DeFalco as its pro, tied at the top.
Each of those teams carded 60s on the 6,018-yard, par-70 link-style course.
“It was end-of-July weather in June, and it helped that there was no wind,” Garvin said afterward, adding that “the course was in amazing shape . . . even though, at 6,000 yards, it’s a relatively short course, it’s more difficult than the yardage.”
Garvin and three other South Fork pros, Steve Luerssen, Cameron Mullen, and Kayla Thompson (with juniors from the Bridgehampton Club), played that day. Luerssen’s group tied for third with Louis de Kerillis’s Southampton Golf Club and Rich Jones’s Pine Ridge teams.
Garvin’s foursome, whose juniors were the Villanova-bound Juan Palacios, East Hampton High’s number-two player last fall, Colin Kelly, another East Hampton High School athlete, and Hudson Vargas, “did okay,” the club’s director of golf said, “though not great. . . . All the kids who played that day loved it. It was great to watch them — they were all quality golfers.”
Dan Frankel, the Met PGA’s director of junior golf, said that holding the Pro Junior at South Fork — the first time it’s been held on the Island — had special meaning inasmuch as “Tim and his late father, who also was a golf pro, in Philadelphia, I believe, played in similar tournaments when he was growing up.”
The leaderboard, aside from the teams named above, also included: Rockaway Hunting, with Ryan George; Muttontown, with Rob Senatore; Vineyards, with James Darcy; Maidstone, with Jake Bosse; Inwood, with Kyle Higgins; St. Joseph’s, with Jeff DiMarco; Southampton, with Jason Russell; Adelphi University, with Bill Bresnan; Gardiner’s Bay, with Quinn Ourada; North Fork, with Kyle Doiron; Gardiner’s Bay, with Dan Lockhart; Piping Rock, with Thomas Freed; Noyac, with Sean Noonan, and Bridgehampton, with Thompson.
Kelly received a “closest to the pin” plaque for having driven to within two feet of the cup on the par-3 fourth hole.
Having been mentored by his father, who played on the PGA tour between 1967 and 1971 before becoming the head pro at the Philmont Country Club outside Philadelphia, and at Admirals Cove in Jupiter, Fla., Garvin, in turn, was honored by the Met PGA last year as an outstanding mentor to younger pros during his two-decade tenure here.
