Ron Kelton may have left the Cape Elizabeth High golf team behind, but he’s still posting the kind of scores that would have him firmly slotted into the team’s No. 1 spot.
Kelton, who graduated this past spring, shot a 72 in the first round of the Maine State Junior Amateur, which was held at Vall Halla Golf Club this week. The number allowed him to lock up the No. 2-seed as the tournament switched from strokeplay to matchplay for the final two rounds.
“I’m feeling confident. It’s solid. As long as things are going my way, I think I can keep it up and shoot real well,” said Kelton. “But as much as I’ve been playing, which hasn’t really been that much, I can’t complain. I felt comfortable out there, so hopefully I can keep it up.”
Some of Kelton’s former teammates, the golfers who will attempt to lead the Capers to a state title in 2005, didn’t feel quite as comfortable on the course. Kelton was slated to play Alex Moran (79) in the second round, but Joe Geoghegan, Matt Bernstein and John Hayes all missed the cut.
Geoghegan’s round included three birdies (three times as many as Kelton) and an eagle, but there were just too many bogeys and doubles mixed in. Geoghegan came in with a front nine score of 40, and then went out in 43 to finish with an 83.
“I’d give the shots right back,” he said. “I couldn’t string any shots together, really.”
Geoghegan doubled the first hole, but bounced back with a birdie on the second to get his round back on solid ground.
“I was one over for a while and I figured I’d be in at 37 or 38, but it just never worked out that way,” he said. “I finished the front nine with an eagle. It was my best hole. I just crushed a driver right down the middle, hit a three-iron, then a nice long putt. But I couldn’t string anything together, and I got off to a bad start on the back, so it went downhill from there.”
Geoghegan, who would like to play both golf and basketball in college, got right back out on the course as soon as he could. Hoping to find his consistency before his next men’s club championship match at Purpoodock (his home course), he played an afternoon round there with some teammates.
Bernstein will be going back to the drawing board as well. He missed the cut with an 87, his worst round of the summer.
“I put two balls out of bounds on the first hole,” he said. “And I was trying really hard to get myself back, play aggresively. It only made things worse.
“I started questioning my shots. I started thinking about my swings a lot more, and that really didn’t make it better.”
Bernstein thought things might turn around after a 300-yard drive on the 11th hole, but he three putted the green and missed short birdie putts on 12, 13 and 14.
What made the day most frustrating for Bernstein, though, was the fact that he’d been playing consistently all summer. He finished 12th at a Callaway PGA Junior Series tournament in New Hampshire two weeks ago by shooting a three-round total of 231 (par was 216) on a difficult course.
Without Kelton leading the way this year, the Capers will need that kind of consistency from one through six.
“We’ve got a pretty solid top six. I think that we just need to take one match at a time in the regular season,” said Bernstein. “Our problem last year in states was that not everyone came to play on the day of states, and I think that if everyone plays their game we should be fine.”
Send questions/comments to the editors.
