Play well and play fast
The Sweeny Cup lives on almost 80 years after its inception
They take their golf very seriously at the Sweeny Cup, and the competition’s namesake undoubtedly would be quite happy about that. Violet Pooley Sweeny loved her golf and she certainly played the game well.
Over a stretch of more than two decades that began in 1905, Sweeny won six Pacific Northwest and nine British Columbia championships and was one of the first women in the world to play to a scratch handicap.
The participants in the Sweeny Cup aren’t all scratch golfers, but they are all solid players.
You must have a handicap factor of 10.0 or less to tee it up in a Sweeny Cup event. And if you don’t happen to play well during an event, you are sent to the sidelines — or the range — to work on your game.
“You have to go to the penalty box,” laughs Sweeny Cup co-chair Jen Donnelly, a former elite-level hockey player. “We have a very strict rule. If you are 20-plus over par you have to sit one Sweeny event. And if you do it again you have to sit out three events. And if you are over 100 I think it’s an automatic three events. It’s a privilege to be playing and we want to keep it that way.”
It was Violet Sweeny herself who started the competition way back in 1936. Her goal was to bring together talented players from clubs throughout the Lower Mainland and give them an opportunity to compete on some of the best local courses.
Nearly 80 years later, that spirit lives on.
The annual competition begins each spring and continues through the summer. This year’s schedule includes stops at Beach Grove, Shaughnessy, Richmond, Squamish, Marine Drive, Vancouver, Quilchena, Point Grey, Meadow Gardens and Seymour golf clubs. The annual Huntting Cup match that Sweeny began in 1926 pitting top Victoria-area golfers against their Vancouver counterparts also lives on.
The golf courses donate an hour’s worth of tee times for each Sweeny Cup event. Points are accumulated at each event and at the end of the season, a winner is presented with the Sweeny Cup, which is permanently housed at the B.C. Golf Museum.
Some of the competitors are well-seasoned players who have competed in and won provincial and national championships. Then there are others, like Donnelly, who took up golf relatively late in life and became hooked.
“It has been a tremendous way to improve my game, watching and playing with some of the best golfers in the Lower Mainland,” says Donnelly, who at age 51 has only been playing golf seriously for about eight years. “I would have to say the Sweeny Cup has made me the golfer I am today and I am still improving. It has been fun and I have made some great friends.”
These women not only play well, they play fast. Pace of play is emphasized.
“We have an elaborate time-chit system and a time clock and if you are over time we are in trouble with those host clubs,” Donnelly says. “They don’t like slow play.
“I have had some great feedback from some of the clubs saying thank you, you guys should be giving seminars on pace of play. I would say on average we play in four hours.”
After their round, they gather in the clubhouse for drinks and maybe a meal.
“We stay at the host club to support them and say thank you very much,” Donnelly says.
Point Grey’s Phyllis Laschuk has been a Sweeny Cup participant for the last 20 years. She won her fourth Sweeny Cup last year and loves the competition and camaraderie.
“It is one of the oldest competitions in Vancouver and is quite a prestigious Cup to play in and it’s great competition because of the 10-and-under handicap rule,” she says.
Laschuk also thinks it’s great that Sweeny, one of the game’s female trailblazers, continues to be remembered.
About 15 years ago, Laschuk was instrumental in bringing in Sweeny’s son to talk about his mother with the group. They learned about a remarkable woman who did things her way. Former Vancouver Sun golf writer Arv Olson chronicled Sweeny in his book, Backspin, 100 years of golf in British Columbia.
“She chain- smoked on the course, often playing shots with a cigarette stuck in the side of her mouth,” Olson wrote.
Olson also noted Sweeny was one of the first to eschew the voluminous skirts worn by women golfers of the day, “becoming one of the first to flash her ankles.”
“She was very much a character,” Laschuk says of Sweeny, who died in 1965. “She was definitely ahead of her time in travelling. She went to the British Amateur (before the First World War). You think about travel back then. I don’t understand how they actually got there and competed. It was really something for her to start this competition and for us to have it continuing all these years later. I think it’s a wonderful thing for women’s golf.”