This past week we had the honor of hosting the 63rd Annual SunTrust Tennessee State Open Championship. The tournament is one of the biggest if not the biggest the State holds. We had 156 players from all over the state come and compete for 3 days and the course was up to the challenge. The winner shot -13 and while that is impressive, I like to look at the facts. Only 10 players finished under par for the week. If you throw out the winning score, the next best score was -5 for 3 days. To me, that says our course can hold up under the best players and gives us something to be proud of. We will be able to build on the momentum of last week and should be able to host more events in the future. Some other interesting facts were that hole #1 played the most difficult for the week. Playing to a stroke average of 4.535. The average score for all 3 days was 74.076. That is 4 over par as the course played to a par 70 for the championship. Hole #3 played as a par 4 and was the 4th most difficult hole for the week. Playing to a 4.403 stroke average. It would have been the easiest hole on the course had it played as a par 5. Notice it played easier as a par 4 than hole #1, 12 and 14. All in all the course was equal to the challenge. The weather was perfect and we received nothing but positive comments about the course, especially the greens.
It was a pleasure to host the State Open and I look forward to hosting future TGA events. It is a positive for us and gives the club great publicity. I know Johnny and I would have liked to have played better but our main focus was making sure the tournament was a success and that BCC showed proudly and that everyone had a great experience. I think we were able to make that happen.