From out of nowhere, senior Tyler Brown fortifies Chesterton’s inexperienced varsity golf team with consistently low scores, not even two years into taking up sport

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Not even two years after taking up the game of golf, senior Tyler Brown reported to Creekside one day, Sand Creek the next for Chesterton High golf team tryouts.
He played the first three holes at Creekside in Valparaiso on a particularly cold day about how most golfers so inexperienced would: quintuple bogey, double bogey, double bogey.”
“Nine over after three,” Brown recounted. “I forgot how to swing the club.”
Then he remembered.
He rallied on the final six holes, playing them three strokes over par, but the final number on a relatively easy course, 48, was not one that would compel a high school coach to keep a golfer in his final year of high school.
“He came out here and played better the next day,” first-year coach Marc Bruner said Thursday as he was leaving Sand Creek, where Chesterton had just gotten the better of Portage in a DAC match, 182-189. “I know he didn’t think he played well, but he was better, and I was like, ‘Well, we’re going to give him a shot.’ We told him, ‘Listen, it could be JV, but we’re going to see what you can do.”
He had already heard what he could do, but he heard it from Brown and had no history with him and therefore no clue what to believe. Golfers, even more than most athletes, can be delusional, conveniently forgetting their duffs and errant putts and reciting their scores followed by a series of ifs and buts.
“The first time I met him he said, ‘Yeah, I can play golf. I can do this and this and this.’ I thought it was talk, and he’s proven it’s not,” Bruner said. “He continually has backed up what he told us he could do. He took it up late. He didn’t play (for Chesterton) until he was a senior and this course is hard. To come out do what he does here is impressive.”
What Brown has done is average in varsity play is average 42.5 in nine-hole, rounds and 87.3 in 18-hole rounds, both slightly ahead of sophomore Jake Bobin (43; 88.5). Brown has been low man in four of his seven competitions. He played JV twice early in the season. Bobin has been low man four times, senior Ryan Kasper once.
In high school golf, each team sends five players onto the course. The highest score is thrown out. The other four scores added together make the team score. Brown and Bobin’s scores have been counted every time they have competed for the varsity. Brown twice played for the JV before earning a permanent spot, usually in the No. 2 slot.
Brown played soccer as a freshman at Chesterton, but said he was driven out of the sport by an assortment of injuries to his knees, hip and ankle.
He was an athlete without a sport, a teammate without teammates, a talker without a regular set of ears.
“I played soccer for a long time, and I needed something to fill the hole,” Brown said. “I got one or two lessons at Creekside, but I mostly just do what comes naturally. My dad pushed me for a really long time to try it ,and then some of my friends wanted to try it. I got a whole set of clubs at garage sale for 10 bucks.”
Once Brown fell in love with golf after beginning to play it in the summer of 2023, he fell hard, played six times a week this past summer, and said he played 30 different courses the summer, one year after taking up the game.
He has upgraded to using “Grandpa Larry’s clubs. He got a set of Wilson clubs. They’re fat shaft clubs and I’ve learned to use those.”
The 38 Brown shot at Forest Park on a day Chesterton lost by one stroke to Valparaiso and easily defeated Merrillville, was the lowest score from anyone on the team this season.
On the ride back to Chesterton that day, Bruner let Brown know, “We almost cut you.”
Working two jobs, one coaching youth soccer players for the club for which he used to compete, the other working outside at Sand Creek, Brown didn’t show up for many of the offseason workouts because of conflicts with his work schedule. Then the tryout didn’t go well.
But Bruner, assistant coach on Candy Wilson’s girls basketball staff, saw enough in Brown that he kept him, the smartest decision Bruner has made in his short career as a golf coach.
Bruner has been most impressed with how well Brown has performed against the greatest opponent any golfer ever will face: his own mind.
“There are some unique things about Tyler,” Bruner said. “His swing is a little different and he knows that, but it’s something that’s worked for him. His strongest quality right now is he has a strong mindset. He never gets down. He has a bad hole, he can self-correct on the course, whether it’s correcting a swing or correcting a chip or whatever it is, or if it’s just saying, ‘I can be better.’ And that’s kind of a big thing for him, ‘I can be better on the next hole.’ Whether he knows how to fix it, I don’t know, but mentally he does. So, he’s got the mental side of it down, which so many people struggle with. He has a positive mindset every time he goes into something, and it was that way from the get-go, from the first time I met him.”
Brown’s chosen path to improvement doesn’t include beating up himself after hitting a bad shot, which helps to explain why his improvement has been so rapid.
“I’m kind of Inconsistent here and there. I don’t know fully what I’m doing, but I would say my best thing is course management,” Brown said. “I know where I’m going to miss if I miss the ball, so I play it safe. But I also don’t let anything get in my head. I’m just out there playing and having a good time.”
At the same time, he pursues improvement aggressively, which is evident when he breaks down his game.
“My irons have been very strong,” he said. “My driver has been iffy, but Coach Bruner helped me with that on the range the other day.”
Brown plays better on the Lake and Creek nines than the Marsh at Sand Creek because the fairways at Marsh are tighter, he said.
His best shot of the season came at Palmira, where he nearly aced No. 15, in a match against Crown Point and Lake Central.
“Par 3 over water, it was like 125 yards, I think, on the dot,” he said. “I hit a really good shot, and it landed like 6 inches in front of the hole, bounced left and it was like a foot away. Almost had my first hole in one. It was very close. I really want one.”
This is someone who until this golf season had only walked 18 holes once, and already he’s craving an ace. High school golfers walk their rounds. In addition to enjoying Sand Creek, Brown gives high grades to Sandy Pines.
“If you get a chance to play Sandy Pines, you have to play it,” he said. “It’s beautiful and they have the best carts.”
The Trojans had a tough 18-hole walk Saturday at the state preview tournament at challenging Prairie View in Carmel. Bobin was the team’s low man with an 89. He chipped in for a birdie and then on the last hole chipped in for a par. Senior Griffin Stanley shot a 91, Brown a 92 and Kasper a 97.
The Trojans play the first of four days of competition this week at their home course, Sand Creek, where they compete against Michigan City and LaPorte on Tuesday. They are back at their home course Thursday to face Lake Central and Merrillville.