Dorset County Golf Union
U12 Five Counties Championship 2025
Our youngest squad took the long journey down to Perranporth Golf Club for the U12’s 5 Counties Championship. A team of 6 would compete for the handicap team championship, whilst there were also prizes for individual gross scores. Dorset obviously fielded a very young side that included 9-year-old Ihan Yoon (youngest in the field) and 10-year-old Zach Ashford.
On the Saturday afternoon the boys headed out for their practice round. It became quickly apparent that the 25 mile per hour winds were going to make things difficult. Unfortunately, that became the understatement of the year with our shorter hitters struggling to reach some fairways from the tee and golf balls being blown sideways! Perranporth is generally a tough course but in these conditions was proving barely playable for some of the under 12’s team. Much of the course is blind and the marker posts are set up for scratch players so there was some unusual navigating to be done. On the morning of the competition, it was decided to continue playing the yellow tees but push them up.
The players arrived for the competition day to black sky’s that soon turned into torrential rain. Every player got totally soaked until the sunshine returned around 1 ½ hours into play……then the wind got up again! It really was the hardest day of golf any of these lads have experienced and I’m so proud they all completed their rounds in this stroke play event. Once again, many fairways were unreachable, and tee shots were simply being gobbled up by the dunes. Needless to say, the scoring wasn’t great, and the team finished 4th, although 2nd, 3rd and 4th were pretty close. A special mention goes to Luc Taylor who finished 3rd in the gross with a fine round of 80. Unfortunately, he dropped 3 shots in the last 2 holes.
It’s fair to say that the boys would have learnt a lot from the weekend and experienced something like not before. Playing back in Dorset will probably seem pretty easy when they get out next weekend.
Dorset now look forward to hosting this event in 2026.
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