Plenty of sunshine for Sun Country Amateur
The aim of the Sun Country Golf house is to grow the game of golf in New Mexico and West Texas.
It’s an alliance that took place in 2019 between the Sun Country Amateur Golf Association (SCAGA) and the Sun Country PGA section, and on Saturday (Oct. 8) and Sunday (Oct. 9) SCAGA conducted the NM-WT [New Mexico-West Texas] Mid-Amateur Championship at the Taos Country Club.
Forty-three golfers registered to compete for the $175 entry fee for a total purse of $1,470, the lower end of SCAGA purses compared to the $3,455 at stake in El Paso and the $2,660 at stake in Elephant Butte.
Kaylinda Crawford’s more than solid 5-under-par outing in the women’s championship flight was partly responsible for one of the biggest disparities across all flights of the tournament. Second place in that flight was 31-over-par. Crawford could have shot 100 and she would have still earned first place with a couple of strokes to spare.
Shaun Payne (-5) went ballistic in the back nine of his second round, stringing together six birdies, three of which were consecutive birdies on holes 16 through 18. He needed all of those birdies — especially the last one on the 18th hole to get the slight victory over Simon Miller (-4). In addition to giving him the victory, the six birdies on the back nine also won him three skins.
Marty Lucero won the Senior Championship flight with a twostroke lead over Jerry Maclas of Idalou. Lucero was the only local golfer to top any of the leaderboards on Sunday. At the Terrace Bar and Grill, one of the bar patrons jokingly drew the handicapped ADA sign symbol on his championship banner, poking fun at the 9-over-par first-place finish.
In an interview with the Taos News, the top player of Net B flight, Mitch Goins of Bloomfield, talked about his experience in the tournament. “This is the first time that I’ve played it. I played a practice round before. The course is in amazing shape. It was beautiful. Everything was amazing out there.”
Goins then talked about how the course played, “the par fives I was hitting a longer club and I just got into some trouble, but other than that, there [were] no really tough holes. I guess 15 would probably be the toughest hole for me. Just kind of the way the green is complex and it’s short, it’s a shorter par-5 from the tees that we were playing from but, I mean, it’s so tight as far as, if you hit it just a little bit left, you’re in trouble.”