Vomit and good golf: New CCU coach returns to Strand with mission and story to tell

The Jim Garren era has begun at Coastal Carolina, as the men’s golf team teed off Monday in its first event with the former Oklahoma assistant as head coach.

The Chanticleers are opening their season Monday and Tuesday in the Janney Invitational hosted by Virginia Commonwealth at the Country Club of Virginia in Richmond, Va.

Garren was hired in July to succeed Chad Wilson, who spent a year as the interim head coach before accepting the Georgia State head coaching position in June.

Garren is the fourth men’s head coach in six seasons and is coming off a national championship as an assistant at Oklahoma, where he spent the past three of his nine seasons in coaching.

Garren shared his thoughts on some of the aspects of the CCU program.

▪  The 17th annual General Hackler Championship is scheduled for March 10-11, a Saturday and Sunday, and will be played at The Dunes Golf and Beach Club for the fourth consecutive year.

Garren wants to continue and build on the tournament and its relationship with The Dunes Club.

“That tournament is going to be a huge event for us,” he said. “They want that to be one of the top events in the country. I was blessed at Oklahoma, we played the best events in the country every year, and I know how that helps you schedule, how that helps you recruit. So we’re going to make that as strong as we can.

“For one, it helps us get into other tournaments. For two, we get to play the best teams in the country here. That’s a relationship we have to maintain and make even better.”

▪  Coastal has a somewhat non-traditional set-up for a Division I program. Many schools have their own golf course on or near campus. Though the Hackler Course is at CCU’s Conway campus, the school regularly practices off campus at locations including The Dunes Club.

“The set-up is a little different there than some of your traditional college towns … but we can beat that with weather, we can beat that with golf courses, we can beat that in some other areas,” he said. “I mean, 100 golf courses in the Myrtle Beach area, I think we’ve got a leg up there. We’ve got the beach, we’ve got the weather, we’ve got some things to recruit to that gives us an advantage.”

▪  Dustin Johnson is the golf program’s and possibly the school’s highest-profile alumnus as the No. 1-ranked pro golfer in the world. Garren was planning to reach out to Johnson and is not averse to using him as a recruiting tool.

“They’re going to be aware that Dustin played here,” Garren said. “… I would always offer him an opportunity to speak to our golf team.”

▪  Garren plans to be involved only in a limited basis in the instruction of his players. His golf instructor as a player was Scott Hamilton of Cartersville Country Club in Georgia, who instructs several PGA Tour members including Boo Weekley, Russell Henley, Chris Kirk and Aaron Baddeley.

“I’m a program manager that understands the golf swing very well,” he said. “The guy that taught me the game is one of the best teachers in the world for the PGA Tour, the guys he works with, so I understand the golf swing. I’m not an instructor. I’m kind of a facilitator. I’m going to manage the program. I’m going to coach.”

▪  Garren hopes his second golf go-around in the Myrtle Beach area goes better than his first.

As a 15-year-old, Garren qualified for the Southern Junior at the Surf Golf and Beach Club, which at the time was the biggest tournament he had entered. After shooting a 78 in the opening round, he was stricken with food poisoning following his meal that evening.

“I can’t hit range balls. I’m on the first tee and I’m throwing up. I’m like, ‘I’m going to withdraw,’ ” Garren recalled. “The starter from the Southern Golf Association said, ‘Just try it.’ So I played, and I threw up on every single hole and I shot 73 and moved way up the leaderboard. It was probably the best round of my life at that point.”

Garren said he was weak, couldn’t hit the ball very far and laid up on many occasions.

“I haven’t been to the Surf Club in 18 years. I’ve got to go check it out and tell them my story,” Garren said. “It was the most miserable good golf round ever. It was probably 95 degrees and it was brutal. And it kind of teaches you things. If you don’t think about it you can actually play pretty good.”

Garren’s interview for the coaching position was his first time on the Grand Strand since that round 18 years ago.

▪  Garren has some recruiting to do, considering the team has just seven players listed on its roster, and two of those have joined the team as seniors. In addition, commitment Kanata Irei of Japan, who attended Heritage Academy in Hilton Head Island, did not enroll at CCU.

Playing in the first event are seniors Thadd Obecny II of West Virginia and Morgan Deneen of California, juniors Luis Ruiz of Mexico and Daniel Overas of Norway, and freshman Jonathan Goth-Rasmussen of Denmark. The Chants are tied for third through two rounds in the 54-hole event at 6-under 570, nine shots behind leader West Virginia, and Obecny is tied for second and a shot out of the indivdual lead at 7-under 137.

Senior Andrew Roy of Massachusetts is playing as an individual and shot a 68 in the opening round, followed by a 78.

Deneen and Roy joined the golf team this year. Both spent their first three years at CCU as students in the school’s PGA Golf Management Program. Roy qualified for the 2017 New England Amateur and Deneen was Coastal’s PGM Club Championship runner-up in 2016.

“This is going to be a process,” Garren said. “It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight because I want to do it the right way with the right kind of people. I want to have people that all of y’all are proud of, that you want carrying the Coastal Carolina bag and representing you. It’s going to take a lot of work recruiting, a lot of work with how we coach them, how we teach them, how we make them better people. But I think the more of a team you put together people-wise the better you’re going to be in the end.”

The CCU women’s golf team began its season Monday as well in the Mercedes-Benz Championship hosted by the University of Tennessee, and coach Katie Quinney’s team is led by senior Malelene Krolboll Hansen of Denmark, the reigning Sun Belt Conference Women’s Golfer of the Year.

Joining Krolboll Hansen in the starting lineup are juniors Marie Lunackova of the Czech Republic and Sena Ersoy of Turkey, and sophomores Stephanie Henning of Sweden and Victoria Parker of New York. CCU is 11th and Krolboll Hansen is 25th at 3-over 145 with a round remaining.

The women’s golf team has a fundraising Birdie Club through the Chanticleer Athletic Foundation that raises money for every birdie made during the season. The team made just over 300 birdies last season.

MB Am held

The inaugural Myrtle Beach Amateur Championship was held at the King’s North Course at Myrtle Beach National from Sept. 8-10, which was unfortunately the weekend Hurricane Irma threatened to come through the Carolina coast. The storm impacted the event’s participation and length.

Organizer Phil Pfeiffer of Myrtle Beach, a support and implementation specialist with Golfnow.com, said there were a lot of late withdrawals resulting in a field of 30 players, and the event was shortened to 36 holes so players could have Sunday to prepare for the storm, which came through the area as a tropical storm with a damaging storm surge. “At the time I had to make that call the situation was still very uncertain,” said Pfeiffer, who played in the tournament and finished third.

Despite the small turnout, Pfeiffer said player feedback was very positive and he’s planning next year’s event. “I do feel quite confident about us continuing and growing the event in 2018 and beyond,” he said.

The tournament cost $184 and included three rounds with cart, daily practice balls, a breakfast buffet prior to the final round and pro shop gift certificate prizes.

Anthony Baker of Walkertown, N.C., won with a 4-under 140 that was seven shots better than runner-up Adam Sperry of Wilmington, N.C. Carl Leslie of Myrtle Beach won the senior division by a shot over Don Sheads of Murrells Inlet with a 151.

It remains to be seen if the Mayor’s Cup, a comparable amateur event that has been held in the Myrtle Beach area for the past 11 years, returns for its 12th playing later this year.

Last year’s tournament in November featured three rounds on the three public golf courses in the Myrtle Beach city limits: Pine Lakes Country Club, the Grande Dunes Resort Course and Whispering Pines Golf Club, which was the tournament’s sole host for its first 10 years.

Organizer Chip Smith, whose company Atlantic Golf Management operates Whispering Pines, said a decision on holding the 2017 tournament hasn’t been made.

City Tour concludes

True Blue Golf Club and Caledonia Golf & Fish Club hosted 120 golfers this past weekend in the Nextgengolf City Tour national championship, which featured players from numerous states.

Players represented cities in the states of California, Michigan, Ohio, D.C., Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Georgia and the Carolinas.

The tour is geared toward young adults and is open to players ages 18 to 39.

“The event went well and it’s a great demographic to reach out to,” said True Blue and Caledonia director of golf operations Bob Seganti. “That’s a group that every golf course operator would like to get in front of. An association like that with events all over the country, why not have Myrtle Beach be their home base? We have everything to offer any age group but we’ve got a lot to offer that age group in particular between the golf courses and nightlife if they’re interested in that.”

Seganti said he has already offered to host the 2018 City Tour national championship, and hopes it at least returns to the Grand Strand. Nextgengolf co-founder and chief executive officer Kris Hart said a championship site hasn’t yet been selected, but in the past it has moved cities each year.

Seganti said there was music and a bar on the True Blue driving range Friday night during registration, a putting contest, and appearance by PGA Tour member Harold Varner III, who played on the courses while in college at East Carolina in the annual Golfweek Program Challenge.

In the national finals, teams of up to six golfers broke into twosomes, and the top two scoring twosomes in each round counted toward the team score.

The City Tour launched in 2014 and features monthly events in 20 cities. About 15,000 golfers were expected to participate this year.

Nextgengolf, which is headquartered in Boston, also operates the National Collegiate Golf Club Association for college students.

Marketing cooperative Myrtle Beach Golf Holiday has a national sponsorship with Nextgengolf that includes a minimum of four events on the Strand, including the national championship, and the Myrtle Beach market will have a marketing presence at 185 Nextgengolf events across the nation. Hart said he plans to return to Myrtle Beach for spring break, college and other events.

Byrd advances

Coastal Carolina graduate Zack Byrd of Murrells Inlet got through the first stage of European Tour Qualifying Tournament last week, tying for eighth at The Roxburghe Hotel & Golf Course in Scotland with a 7-under 69-70-69-73–281.

The top 20 and ties advanced to the second of three Q-School stages. Byrd will return Nov. 3-6 to one of four second stage sites in Spain. The finals are Nov. 11-16 at Lumine Golf Club in Tarragona, Spain.

Byrd has been playing on the South Africa-based Sunshine Tour and is 13th on the Order of Merit with approximately $18,000 earned while playing in 10 of the tour’s 13 events thus far. He plans to remain in Murrells Inlet for at least another month, and expects to qualify for two or three events co-sanctioned by the Sunshine and European tours later this year.

This story was originally published September 18, 2017 at 10:19 PM with the headline "Vomit and good golf: New CCU coach returns to Strand with mission and story to tell."