One day before Rory McIroy’s wild ride to his first green jacket, CHS sophomore Jake Bobin mixed great shots and blow-up holes for a team-best 80 in season-opening tournament

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Not all rounds of 80 look the same on a golf scorecard.
“Seven bogeys, two doubles, that’s not going to do it,” Chesterton sophomore Jake Bobin said of his first round of the season, a team-best 80 shot at the Rochester Invitational. “An 80’s fine. I just would like to be more consistent than having doubles, blow-up holes.”
Bobin uttered those words Monday afternoon, two days after his round in Rochester and one day after he watched on TV from his job at Net Par as Rory McIlroy, the world’s most beloved golfer, became the first Masters champion in history to win the green jacket with four double bogeys, two coming on Sunday.
“It was pretty cool,” Bobin said of watching McIlroy survive his hiccups to prevail. The lesson McIroy taught every golfer in the world by alternating bad shots and incredible ones was not lost on Bobin. “You just have to keep the right mindset the whole time. Even if you have one bad hole, you’ve got to let it go. Bad shot, let it go. He did.”
Nothing helps a golfer let go of a bad shot more than a great one, and McIlroy and Bobin both did that over the weekend.
Bobin carded back-to-back doubles and helped wash those away by chipping in for birdie twice, from 42 yards and 20 yards, on a day head made three birdies and just six pars. McIroy had just seven pars on his topsy-turvy card that included his seventh birdie on the lone playoff hole.
Bobin finished in a three-way tie for seventh, five strokes behind winner Carter Demske from Garrett.
Given that this spring has not allowed for as much outdoor practice as most years for Northwest Indiana golfers, an 80 was a solid opener for Bobin, but he has gone lower. He said his best round came at his challenging home course, Sand Creek Country Club. Playing the Lake and Creek nines on that summer day with his father, Bobin shot a 74.
Bobin said he didn’t find Round Barn Golf Club to be as much to his liking as Sand Creek.
“I probably won’t go back any time soon,” he said. “It was tough. It was very tight, a lot of water.”
Fellow sophomore Tyler Racette had the next best score, 87, for a Chesterton team that finished ninth among 16 teams with a 361 team score. Senior Ryan Kasper shot a 95, junior Drew Pacilio a 99.
“The course was tough,” Bruner said. “It was short, definitely more of a shot-maker’s course, and I think we struggled with that a little bit as a whole. We weren’t able to just get out there and swing. You had to kind of know the course a little bit. We had some notes on it, and we had some yardages and stuff that we wanted but that’s not the same as the experience of playing it and none of these guys played it last year. A lot of teams had seniors who had played it before. We just didn’t.”
The problem with high school golf is that players can only complete a round as swiftly as their playing partners, some of whom can be so impervious to the rest of the world they wouldn’t think to get out of the way for an ambulance.
“For Tyler and Drew, it turned into almost a six-hour round,”first-year Chesterton golf coach Marc Bruner said. “They were playing with kids who didn’t have a sense of urgency, and they were waiting on other kids, Tyler especially. Tyler was playing in a group that was really slow, so for him to shoot an 87 with that kind of pace, that was pretty good.”
The Trojans will return to competition Tuesday, when Andrean, Boone Grove and Lowell visit them at Sand Creek.