Taking a swing at boys’ club
Rule blocks 16-year-old golfer’s tourney win – because she’s a girl
The record books won’t note Emily Nash’s amazing three-over-par high school tournament victory — because she’s a girl.
That has golfers from all over the country calling to praise the 16-year-old Lunenburg High junior who beat all the boys.
“It still kind of stinks,” Nash told the Herald last night. She had to give up the trophy to the second-place finisher.
“I’m disappointed I didn’t get the trophy. But that’s OK. Even if I didn’t get the trophy, everyone knew my score,” she said. “In golf, it’s all about the rules.”
But she added, “I feel like this has the potential to change something. Maybe if the higher-ups start noticing it, too.”
She finished with a score of 75 to top the Central Massachusetts Division 3 boys’ golf tournament on Tuesday at Blissful Meadows Golf Club in Uxbridge. It was one round of 18 holes.
Emily said she focused on her short game to make up for the boys’ longer drives — but they all hit off the same tee.
Her individual first-place finish was null-and-void because of a long-standing MIAA rule that states girls on a fall boys’ team cannot move on to the Boys Fall Individual Tournament next week.
Girls play in the spring, the rules state.
“I texted my parents and told them ‘I think I won. I finally won districts,’” Nash said. “It’s a little unfair ... the tournament director said he’d give me a trophy.”
Her grace has won over supporters from all corners — from her parents, principal and golf pros.
“It’s nice, especially from the golf world, to see so many people supporting me,” she said of the texts filling up her phone. “In a perfect world, I’d like this rule to change. They should look into it and make adjustments.”
The snub has rankled several prominent female members of the women’s golf community.
“(Emily) gets penalized for being a good player,” said Anne Marie Tobin, a seven-time Massachusetts state amateur women’s golf champion and a member of the Massachusetts Golf Association Hall of Fame. “The best player in that tournament wasn’t named the winner because of a technicality.”
For Elaine Moulison Greenhalge, the rule and Nash’s situation harkens back to the time when she became the first female in New England allowed to compete on a boys golf team when she joined the Bishop Fenwick High School program back in the early 1960s.
“I just think that we’ve progressed so far and to read something like this is like going back to the Dark Ages,” said Greenhalge, who will be inducted in the Bishop Fenwick Athletic Hall of Fame next month.
Richard Pearson, associate executive director of the MIAA, said the ruling did not come as a surprise to either Nash or the Lunenburg High athletic department, adding it is “explicit, and it is pretty clear.”
Kim Johnson, who played on the Hopkinton High boys’ team with current PGA professionals Jon Curran and Keegan Bradley in the early 2000s before playing for Duke University, also faced similar obstacles.
“It’s funny because I’ve actually played golf with (Emily) and she’s a good little player and she has a good head on her shoulders, so I am sure she wasn’t too shaken up by this (ruling), but I think part of the problem is that those rules need to be revisited,” said Johnson. “I know for me when I was going through it the officials wouldn’t let me hit from the same tees as the boys, so I couldn’t win.”
Nash says there is one happy ending: “I still get to play and get better.”