Freshman status does not prevent Zac Racette from already becoming a steady force for the Chesterton varsity golf team

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Ball hawks stop at nothing to add to their collection of used golf balls. They patrol the woods, wade in creeks and in extreme cases even don wet suits and swim goggles to dive into ponds to pull out golf balls late at night.
Ball hawks new to a course have been known to find someone who plays it regularly to ask what spots are most likely to yield big hauls.
If you’re a golf ball hawk and want to know where the mother lodes can be found on Northwest Indiana courses, Chesterton freshman Zac Racette is the last golfer to ask for tips on that. How should he know? He spends all day in the fairway.
Of late, Racette’s consistency stretches well beyond his tee shots all the way to his scorecard. If Reggie Jackson is Mr. October, Jerry West was Mr. Clutch and Joe DiMaggio was Mr. Coffee, then for the moment Zac Racette is Mr. 85.
In a rare feat for any golfer, Racette has carded the exact same score, 85, in each of his last three rounds for the Chesterton golf team. The nickname wouldn’t last though because the plan calls for him to dip into the 70s before the season ends and doing so won’t require any changes in how he starts holes, only in how he finishes them.
He said he twice has shot a 78, once last summer at Forest Park in Valparaiso, and during spring break in Gulf Shores, Alabama at Kiva Dunes during a family golf trip with his mother, father and brother, Tyler, a junior on the golf team.
After Zac’s most recent 85, crafted Saturday in the Lake Central Classic at Sandy Pines, Chesterton coach Marc Bruner weighed in on what makes Racette a consistent varsity golfer at such a young age and well before he has hit his growth spurt.
“He’s Mr. Consistency right now, for sure. He’s not a long hitter, but not hitting it long also comes with he doesn’t make a lot of big mistakes,” Bruner said. “He’s a good ball striker. He hits the ball straight.”
So straight that Bruner likes Racette’s chances of getting into the 70s this season.
“Right now, he loses strokes on the green. That can be his way of to get from 85 to high 70s,” Bruner said. “Here and there he’s missing putts that he can make, or a couple of three-putts that he has to get rid of. When you talk about Jake (Bobin), he doesn’t miss those. Jake makes par putts that would turn into bogeys for a lot of guys, and Zac can get there.”
Toward that end, Bruner said, “We talked about his process a little bit, his routine on the green, where he just needs to slow down, take his time a little bit. I was happy to see on his last hole there, he addressed the ball, took a couple of practice swings and buried it. That’s kind of what I was on him about. He three-putted from about 4 feet and turned it into a bogey. Just slow down, dude. But there are no complaints here with a freshman with three straight rounds at 85.”
Racette figures he was “3 or 4” when he took up the game of golf in the back yard.
“My clubs were plastic,” he said.
And his teacher, his father, is the real deal. A former Big 12 golfer at Kansas State, Brian Racette is superintendent at the pristinely manicured Sand Creek Country Club, home course of Chesterton’s boys and girls golf teams.
Inheriting those genes and receiving instruction from someone with that credibility make it easy to be bullish on Zac’s future. The fact that he hits the ball straight is another reason for optimism because it suggests he’s not trying to murder the ball, a prescription for disaster.
Having the ability to leave bad shots behind him by figuring out adjustments on the fly also bodes well for his future.
Racette, who said chipping was the best aspect of his most recent 85, shared one such adjustment he made during the round Saturday: “I had the ball too far in front of my stance for my irons, so I put it farther back and started to hit the ball better.”
As for how he figured out ball placement was the issue, he said: “I was hitting the ground just before the ball and I was pulling it. And so when I put it back I was hitting the ball better and I was hitting it straighter.”
Zac didn’t blame his off putting day on the greens at Sandy Pines, a course so beautiful it can have a soothing impact on golfers.
“I like it because it’s green and I like the greens. They’re fast and they’re hard and I like that,” he said.
His even demeanor is another reason to believe he can stay on a steady improvement curve.
“He’s learning, he’s growing, and he’s just fun to have on the team,” Bruner said.
And Zac’s answer to the question “How often did you golf in the summer?” counts as the No. 1 reason to believe big strides are coming from him: “Just about every day.”