Werenski’s strategy paying off at Barracuda

They’ve had a while to let it sink in. The historic significance. The bond they’ll always share. Charles R. Drew Charter School in Southeast Atlanta, which last May became the first all-black high school team and first public school in the city to win the Georgia (public-school) state boys’ golf championship, opens defense of its title as the season begins this month. Optimism abounds. “We’re looking strong,� says Nyre Williams, a Director at The First Tee of Metro Atlanta and an assistant coach at Drew. “We lost three seniors, but we’ve got a pipeline here.� He would know; Williams also coaches Drew Charter’s middle school golfers. After taking state last May, the Drew high boys basked in their accomplishment and filed off the bus and into the embrace of joyous and proud family members. They received rings they helped design themselves at a ceremony in November. “Seeing the kids just so happy,� fifth-year head coach Joe Weems says of his personal highlight. “Coming back to the school and seeing the families, seeing everybody so overjoyed and relieved that we had won. Putting on that championship ring was an amazing experience.� The whole world, it seemed, took notice. The Drew kids were recognized by the government of DeKalb County, and were practically celebrities at the TOUR Championship in August, meeting stars such as Tony Finau and Kevin Kisner. Attending the ceremony for 2019 Calvin Peete Award recipient Harold Varner III in October, their jaws dropped when Varner’s manager told them the HV3 Foundation would be donating $5,000 to the program. “This is just the beginning of my relationship with those kids and coaches,� Varner told Golfweek. “… I can’t wait to create a bond with them.� It’s heady stuff, but this week they open the new season, and everyone starts at zero. Anthony Ford, Drew’s No. 1 last year and one of 78 members of The First Tee to play in the PGA TOUR Champions PURE Insurance Championship in September – which, like this week’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, uses Pebble Beach Golf Links as the host course – returns for his senior year. He recently signed for a full scholarship to play golf at North Carolina A&T. Sophomore Miles Richardson returns, as do senior Connor Mason, who can play both lefthanded and righthanded, and others. Enough team members shoot in the 70s and 80s to fuel hopes of a repeat. “I really like our chances again this year,� Williams says. Weems doesn’t disagree. “That’s the attitude I definitely would want us to have,� he says. Starting from scratch Not long ago, the Drew Charter School couldn’t field a full team of players who could compete over 18 holes, and other schools sometimes balked at the idea of scheduling a match. Now look at them. “We are like pioneers,� Mason told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last summer. Indeed, the Drew Eagles beat the two-time defending state champions by an audacious 15 strokes. From there, they represented Georgia at the High School Golf National Invitational at Orlando’s Disney World in June, when they finished 20th. Solomon Dobbs, who now plays golf for Morehouse College, says being a member of the state-title-winning team last year has forever changed his life. “I think about the power of connections,� says Dobbs, who hit the ceremonial first tee shot at the TOUR Championship last summer and imagines returning to Drew one day to coach golf. “I’ll get calls from my teammates asking if I want to go play somewhere, and I still talk to Coach Nyre and Coach Joe. How’s it going? Do you need any help? The bond is so strong.� Weems marvels at all the things that fell into place to make it happen, starting with the photo of himself with his arms around his first bag of clubs when he was 8. His late father, Joe Sr., who drove 18-wheelers and owned his own trucking company, gave the clubs to him out of the blue. “I was so new to it I didn’t even know how to hold them,� Weems says with a laugh. He sometimes shows the photo to Drew parents in order to cultivate buy-in. Look what can happen when you put your child into golf. In 1980, Weems’ great uncle, Miles Craddick, then a caddie at Athens (Georgia) Country Club, taught the boy how to build a nine-hole backyard course using Styrofoam cups with the bottoms carved out. It was the year that gave us PAC-MAN, the Rubik’s Cube and Atlanta-born CNN. No one was shouting the praises of East Lake, then a go-at-your-own-risk type of area, but that began to change in the mid-1990s when the East Lake Foundation started revitalizing the neighborhood. Golf was central to the effort, and when Drew opened in 2000, it was conveniently located within walking distance of East Lake Golf Club – former home of Bobby Jones and host course for the TOUR Championship – and the nine-hole, par-30 Charlie Yates Golf Course. Drew began offering the sport in P.E. classes through The First Tee – there are now three certified instructors at the school – and Dobbs started taking golf in the second grade. Ford, who broke the back window of his family’s Jeep Cherokee with one of his first swings, started the same way. Kids continue to learn the fundamentals, plus etiquette and caddie protocol. (If you play East Lake, you just might get a Drew player on your bag.) Success didn’t happen overnight, but some kids took to it and pulled their peers up with them. “We try to mentor these kids, too,� Weems says. “It’s not just golf, it’s about having someone they can go to throughout the day just in general. I’m real big on culture and climate. The culture is having a winning attitude, but the climate is about family and taking care of one another.� The pipeline was born. Looking ahead Could this be a dynasty? Perhaps. Although African American representation in golf has been historically low, Drew continues to make the most of some unique advantages. “Having two golf courses in between our school has helped,� Weems says. “Charlie Yates being our home, kids can walk right to the course. And East Lake, these kids have access to see things that a lot of kids don’t, and that’s a real advantage.� Things like the annual TOUR Championship, with 30 of the best golfers on the planet. “Every kid in our program either volunteered or was out in the course with their parents,� Weems says. “We make sure the conversation about golf is happening year-round, with clinics and tournaments and workouts. I want them to be around it as much as they can.� How’s this for golf immersion? Williams once took four First Tee kids to Scotland, where they stayed on the University of St. Andrews campus and played some of the game’s most famous courses. The highlight: a surprise tee time at the Old Course. Not a bad field trip. What Drew has accomplished continues to resonate on TOUR and beyond, no place more loudly than the hallways of the school itself, where the state championship hardware lives in a trophy case. Not surprisingly, interest is up. “I expect more than 35 kids to try out this year,� Weems says. “We started out with 21 my first year, and we’ve been growing ever since.� For the boys’ team, the differences going into this season would seem to be small. Two local chapters of The First Tee merged to form The First Tee of Metro Atlanta last summer. There will be a dedicated junior varsity team this year. And one of Drew’s returning players, senior Mason, has decided to go back to lefthanded this season after one season as a righty.     “I kept telling him I thought his scores were better as a lefty when he was a sophomore, when he shot in the mid-80s,� Weems says. “Last year he was in the 90s as a righty.� Historic. Dynastic. Ambidextrous. There seems to be no limit to what Drew can do. Oh, there’s one other big difference now that Drew is the reigning state champ. Weems has no more trouble scheduling other teams to play his own. (Go figure.) “We try to play the programs who were always willing to play us, which we didn’t always have,� he says. “We want programs like Maynard Jackson (a nearby high school named after the city’s first black mayor) to keep growing because it’s better for all of us, so we invest into those other programs in the community and make sure they’re doing great, too.� Can Drew repeat? Maybe, but that’s not the point. Maybe it’s more about access and opportunity. Maybe it’s about that bond and getting into a game you can play for a lifetime. Weems, who began his coaching career in football – Drew has no football team – sometimes thinks about Joe Sr., who died about 10 years ago. What would he say? “He loved to watch Calvin Peete on TV, and Tiger, of course,� Weems says. “He said, ‘Son, there are a lot of things that happen out on the golf course. You’ve got to be able to interact with people.’ He would always say to me as a football coach, ‘One day you’re going to coach a champion.’ Little did I know that he could see that far ahead.�

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DETROIT – Rickie Fowler was going the wrong direction, but he rallied with three back-nine birdies and shot a 1-under 71 to make the cut at the Rocket Mortgage Classic at Detroit Golf Club. It was his first made cut since the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard in March “Knew I needed to jump on the horse and get things going,” said Fowler, who is working on swing changes and came into this week 108th in the FedExCup and 31st in the world. “Made a few better swings on the back nine.” RELATED: Leaderboard | Wolff: ‘Maybe I need to impress the old greats’ Fowler, a Rocket Mortgage and Quicken Loans ambassador, had missed the weekend rounds in his previous two Return to Golf starts, at the Charles Schwab Challenge and RBC Heritage. He had struggled with blisters at the RBC, where he missed the cut by only a shot. “It’s nice to finally have a Saturday tee time,” he said. “I’m kind of sick and tired of taking weekends off, so I really wasn’t looking forward to that. Needed a little back nine action. We got it done.” Normally one of the best putters in the game, he looked into lackluster recent results and realized he was standing too close to the ball, which was leading to chaos in the stroke. Having adjusted, he saw some improvement in a solid first round at the Rocket Mortgage. He narrowly lost strokes to the field on the greens in round two. “Everything’s been getting better and better,” Fowler said. “Yesterday (a 5-under 67) could have been a lot better than it was, but happy with the progress we’re making. Like I said, Saturday tee time’s a good thing. It’s a pretty bunched up leaderboard. Go put together a good one tomorrow morning and we’re right back in it.”

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Despite the fireworks of the first three events of the FedExCup Playoffs, the TOUR Championship still validates a full season’s worth of consistently strong form. As it should. For the second consecutive season, exactly 25 golfers who opened the Playoffs inside the top 30 in points qualified for the season finale at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta. All 30 in the field are slotted below. Beneath them are trends at the TOUR Championship, a profile of the host course and more. Of the qualifiers for the TOUR Championship who began the BMW Championship outside the top 30 in FedExCup points, only Keegan Bradley (win) and Xander Schauffele (T3) advanced. Speaking of whom, that’s the rub for winning the Playoffs finale – the champ isn’t guaranteed the opportunity to defend. Schauffele started this Playoffs seeded 28th, but Bradley began 49th. With Gary Woodland (33rd), Billy Horschel (41st), Cameron Smith (53rd) and Hideki Matsuyama (76th), the quintet comprises this year’s grouping that opened outside the top 30. Previous champions also must earn their way back to East Lake, although unlike last year when only Jordan Spieth represented prior winners of the TOUR Championship at East Lake, five are committed this week, including two-time winner Phil Mickelson. (Ironically, Spieth failed to qualify at 31st in points.) Seventeen from last year’s TOUR Championship are back this week. Six are debutants, including points leader Bryson DeChambeau. If he or any of the other four inside the top five in points – Justin Rose (2nd), Tony Finau (3rd), Dustin Johnson (4th), Justin Thomas (5th) – prevails, he will win the FedExCup and the $10-million bonus. DeChambeau already has proven that inexperience can be overrated, but he’s further inspired by the achievements of Bill Haas (2011), Henrik Stenson (2013) and Schauffele (2017), all of whom captured victory in their first appearance at East Lake. However, as Schauffele now aims to become the first in tournament history to successfully defend a title, DeChambeau wages his own battle with a drought. None of the last nine No. 1 seeds entering the TOUR Championship won the FedExCup. East Lake presents as fair a test as any of the entrants would want. It’s a stock par 70 tipping at 7,362 yards again this year. Hitting fairways is toughest and important, just not the priority. Hitting greens and pouring in putts is the ticket. Distance off the tee already is synonymous with most in the field, but scoring on the vulnerable pair of par 5s is key. The 525-yard sixth hole is the par 5 going out. Its counterpart on the back side measures 590 yards and serves the finish line as No. 18. Since 2016 when the nines were flipped to shift the old par-3 closer into position as the new ninth hole, both eventual winners birdied the 18th hole in the final round. In fact, of the 59 golfers who completed the final round in the last two years, they converted one eagle and 31 birdies combined. A would-be clubhouse leader won’t feel safe unless he’s sitting on a three-stroke margin with that hole still in front of his nearest in pursuit. Last year’s field average of 69.383 matched the lowest (2013) since Rees Jones’ renovation after the 2007 edition. Another sub-par split can’t be ruled out this week. Primarily favorable weather conditions should keep the stage dry and allow the bermudagrass greens to reach 13 feet of the Stimpmeter. It’ll be warm and muggy throughout as autumn is ushered in on the weekend. Wind won’t be a factor. No matter the experience in the tournament, the TOUR Championship serves as a celebration. In addition to the bonus prize money on top of official earnings, all 30 in the field are treated to carte-blanche scheduling next season that includes exemptions into the Masters, U.S. Open and Open Championship. But winning is, of course, special. The tournament champion receives a three-year PGA TOUR exemption. The FedExCup champ is further rewarded with a spot in the Sentry Tournament of Champions (if not already exempt) and a five-year TOUR exemption. ROB BOLTON’S SCHEDULE PGATOUR.COM’s Fantasy Insider Rob Bolton reviews and previews every tournament from numerous angles. Look for his following contributions as scheduled. MONDAY: Rookie Ranking, Power Rankings TUESDAY*: Fantasy Insider, Facebook Live WEDNESDAY: One & Done THURSDAY: Champions One & Done * – Rob is a member of the panel for PGATOUR.COM’s Expert Picks for PGA TOUR Fantasy Golf presented by SERVPRO, which also publishes on Tuesday.

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