Lucas Punkari
After a couple of years’ absence, a golf team has returned to Fort High, with its first NorWOSSA tournament of 2012 taking place in Dryden today.
Leading the charge in resurrecting the Muskie program is local golf pro Brian Johnstone, who thought the fact that Fort High no longer had a golf program was something that should be rectified.
“Every other school in Northwestern Ontario has a team, so I don’t see why Fort Frances should be out of the loop,” Johnstone said.
“The golf team has sort have been falling apart here in the last couple of years due to a lack of interest, so I took it upon myself to try and re-energize it as I know how much fun golf can be.
“There is quite a good crop of young kids coming up at the moment, and I think for them it will be great for them to have the opportunity to play a sport in high school that they might not have thought they could have had a chance to do,” he added.
After talking with prospective golfers over the past week, Johnstone was expecting five boys to come out for the first practice yesterday afternoon, with those players making up the squad for this year.
“Each of the [schools] in NorWOSSA have five-person teams, with the top four scores being used to determine the overall score,” he explained.
“With our first practice being on Tuesday, I think that the first tournament is going to be a fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants, unorganized, and chaotic mess.
“But as long as we get things rolling, we should be fine,” Johnstone added.
While the exact dates still are being set in stone, two other NorWOSSA tournaments currently are scheduled to take place in Atikokan on Tuesday, Sept. 11 and Sioux Lookout on Monday, Sept. 17, with the NWOSSAA championships tentatively slated for Thursday, Sept. 27 in Kenora.
The winner of that event then will advance to the all-Ontario championships, which will be held in Vineland (just outside of St. Catharines) on Oct. 10-11.
Although it’s hard to say how the team will perform, Johnstone’s goals for this year is to just get the program established for the future.
“One of the main things that I want do is to build up some interest with not only the golfers, but also in the community to help support the program,” he explained.
“Everything that the golfers do in this first year will be out of their own pockets,” he noted.
“But we would ultimately like to turn it into a sport where you get some funding to help the players travel to events among other things.”
