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ENTRY forms for the 2012 Scottish Women’s Golf Championship, to be played over the Tain Golf Course from May 15 to 19, are now available to download from the Scottish Ladies Golf Association website.
The form, accompanied by the entry fee of £40, must be submitted to the SLGA by Monday, April 16. Entries into the field of 132 will be accepted from holders of a handicap below 20.4, which should allow for a big Ross-shire presence.
The format of the competition is 36 holes of qualifying, from which the top 32 progress into matchplay for the title. The next 16 scratch qualifiers play in a second flight of matchplay for the Clark Rosebowl, and in addition during the qualifying rounds there are county and club team events.
All in all it should be a great week, not only for local members but for the many visiting golfers the competition will bring to Tain.
The club is still reaping the rewards of staging the Scottish Girls’ Championship in 2005, and club secretary Maggie Vass, in her first full year as secretary, is already gearing up for a busy year.
Maggie’s appointment continues a long family connection with the club, her father, Willie Russell, having been a past captain and serving secretary at the time of the club’s centenary in 1990.
The Russell family will be prominent competitors when the "Scottish" arrives. The golfing prowess of daughters Mary Smith and Anne Ryan and granddaughter Sammy Vass are well documented, Mary and Anne now becoming fixtures in the Scottish senior team.
By May, Sammy will be coming to the end of a third term at the Gardner Webb College in North Carolina, and "it will be touch and go if she makes it home" said her mother last week.
"It will depend on how her college golf team are doing on the US college circuit. She managed to make it back for last year’s championship at Machrihanish after I collected her at Glasgow Airport and drove her straight to the course. But at least if I have to do the same this year, she won’t be teeing off on a course she does not know."
Tain is also staging the men’s North of Scotland championship at the end of August, so that will mean more work for their long-serving head greenkeeper Ian McLeod and his staff. Two of the feature holes – the 11th, "the Alps", and the 16th, "Pelagic" – remain virtually unchanged from when the then St Duthus Golf Club founding members chose the best and most renowned planner, Old Tom Morris, to come to Tain and set our their course.
The Alps still retains the two guarding hills from where the hole derived its name, but Kelag has a completely different obstacle. Where the River Tain has to be crossed from the tee, it is tidal, and at full tide water can surround the green on three sides: hence the hole becoming an aquatic terror.
In the frame at Kinloss
MUIR OF ORD member Vince Tillman finished in third place, two shots behind scratch winner Gordon Macdonald (Torvean), but first in his handicap category, when the North Scottish Alliance fixtures got under way for 2012 at Kinloss Country Club last Saturday.
Against the par of 67, five-handicapper Tilman grossed 69 and won the handicap category 0-7 with a nett 64. Clubmate Alan Imrie grossed 72 for nett 65 and a share of second handicap in the same section, while Dave Spence (Fortrose and Rosemarkie) won section 8-14 with a nett 65, off 14.
The North Scottish fixture this weekend (Saturday) is at Moray Golf Club (Old course) and the North Alliance fixture (Sunday) is hosted by Reay Golf Club.
