The formula for determining the golf team champion of the Monticello Empire League is a bit complicated.
Vacaville High, however, kept it simple and erased all doubt by not only going 10-0 in the regular season but also winning the league tournament on a sunny but windy Tuesday afternoon at Rancho Solano golf course.
The Bulldogs were led by Jack Mitchells’s 86 over 18 holes, followed by Ben Wilhite (89), Dylan Dzierman (97), Tyler Riley (100), and Evan Wilson (108), for the low team score of the day, 480.
The MEL by-laws state that the league champion is determined by using the following system: a) A dual-meet win is awarded one (1) point. b) A tie is awarded 1/2 point. c) The first league tournament is scored the same as a dual meet. d) In the second league tournament, a team earns one point for each team that finishes below them.
There was only one league tournament, the one played Tuesday, so Vacaville scored five points by finishing above the other five MEL schools.
However, individual golfers were still able to compete for the honor of making the All-League team and for Golfer of the Year.
Rodriguez’s junior sensation, Easton Hether, won the coveted award for best golfer. He had the low score of the day (73) to earn 24 individual points. In a dual meet, the top golfer gets 12 points, the second golfer, 11, etc. But in the league tournament, points are doubled. So the top finisher gets 24 points, the number two finisher 22, etc.
Hether had 144 points for the year. The top eight in points make the all-MEL team. The other all-leaguers are, in order of points, Vanden’s Jerah Venkaiya, Wilhite, Rodriguez’s Will Blair, Mitchell, Will C. Wood’s Sean Riley, Dzierman, and Wood’s William Booth.
“I felt pretty good,” said Hether. “It was definitely windy today and the conditions were tough. I think I adjusted for it and just tried to play my own game. It was a little tougher on the back nine. I had a couple of more mistakes on the back nine than I did on the front nine that I shouldn’t have, so I paid for that.”
Rodney Peters, Rodriguez High head coach, said, “When I met Easton, he was a sixth-grader. He was up here at Rancho Solano playing with his dad, and his dad said, ‘My son is going to go to Rodriguez. He’s going to be playing for you.’ And I’m like, ‘I’ve heard that several times.’”
Peters said that a lot of younger golfers end up going to Justin Siena or De LaSalle or find another sport. But Hether was the exception
“By his seventh-grade year, he came to a couple of our practices and met the kids,” said Peters. “And he just kept continuing on and came in as a freshman and made all-league and Golfer of the Year.”
Peters said Hether has cut his stroke count for nine holes by five or six since his freshman campaign.
“His strength is that he puts the time in,” said his coach. “He is up here five, seven days a week. Yesterday he was out here putting and drained 100 three-foot putts in a row. He is a realist. He understands what his capabilities are and what it is going to take to be in that top echelon.”
Hether said that if makes 99 of those putts in a row in practice but misses the 100th, he starts all over again.
“It definitely paid off a little bit today because I made some key putts within five feet,” said Hether.
Vacaville head coach Tom Kutz, in his 13th year, has had better teams score-wise but said that effort-wise this one is second to none.
“It’s been a really fly-by season,” said Kutz. “We really didn’t have any preparation but a lot of these kids came ready to play. I sent an email out in December and we assembled (a team) before we really knew we were going to have a season. I bet that we would have a season and if we didn’t so what.”
Kutz had ten players ready to go, and one of the biggest reasons the team was successful this year was that the teammates pushed each other to top performances.
The top three, junior Mitchell, freshman Wilhite and senior Dzierman, played their best golf when they had to play against Hether, but that was only in the two dual meets against Rodriguez and Tuesday’s tournament. The rest of the time they had to challenge each other.
“Our top three came in hot, and the bottom three, because they are pushed by those you can’t see, have gotten better,” said Kutz, referring to the other four golfers on the ten-man squad vying for those bottom three spots. “So our scores were good because of the team, not because of any individual.”
Mitchell had to weather a family tragedy, as his father passed away suddenly three years ago.
“It was rough for a while,” said Mitchell. “He was my mentor in golf and in everything. That was pretty tough. He was always hard on me about grades, so I’ve been keeping my grades as best as I can and playing golf. Right after he passed it was really hard to go back to the course, especially our home course, Green Valley. But I kind of took it as a positive, sort of playing for him, so that’s a cool thing.”
Mitchell, like everyone else, found Tuesday’s winds challenging.
“Front nine I was rolling the putts really good,” he said. “I was hitting greens. I didn’t miss a fairway. The back nine the winds started messing with everybody’s ball. But I was lucky to get out the way I did. We had gusts that felt like 60 miles per hour. It was insane.”
Dzierman’s story is unusual in that he did not come out for the team until his senior year.
“He’s come from nowhere and he’s just a solid scorer, a solid teammate,” said Kutz. “Now I think he’s completely hooked and wants to be part of the team next year (possibly as a coach).”
Vacaville’s No. 4 golfer, Riley, is a wrestler. In a normal high school sports year, he wouldn’t have been able to both play golf and wrestle. But this year he will be able to do both, as wrestling won’t start until later this spring.
Will C. Wood was led by Sean Riley’s 91.