Kenneth Brown
of The Clarion

Junior golfer Keaton Cote of Kindersley has finished third in a national skills competition at the famed Glen Abbey course – and that wasn’t his only memorable experience at the Toronto-area course.

Cote, 11, travelled to Oakville, Ont., in July to compete in the Future Links National Golf Skills Challenge by Golf Canada. If golfing at one of Canada’s most famous golf courses, the first course Jack Nicklaus ever designed, is not enough, how about playing a hole with the world’s best golfer?

Keaton Cote stands with Weyburn’s Graham DeLaet during the week of the 2017 RBC Canadian Open at the storied golf course Glen Abbey in Oakville, Ont.

The local golfer qualified for the national competition by competing in a skills competition at the Elmwood Golf and Country Club in Swift Current in June. Keaton’s father Rob Cote, who has run a junior golf program in Kindersley in the past, said the cutoff for golfers was June 28.

Keaton won his age group in Saskatchewan for golfers ages nine to 11 and he ended up ranked fifth in the country out of approximately 500 golfers, according to Rob. The father said he got a call from Golf Canada asking Keaton to travel to Oakville for the national contest.

The skills competition included putting, chipping, driving and iron play. The junior golfers in various age groups take three puts, three chips, three drives and three iron shots, and they receive a score for how well they performed each shot.

Keaton’s score of 285 points in Swift Current put him in a tie for sixth place, but one golfer registered two of the top five scores so Keaton was bumped up to fifth place. He’s one of only five golfers his age to get the opportunity to compete in the national competition.

The Cote family arrived at Glen Abbey on July 21 to register for the contest. Rob said the golfers and their guests were given a tour of the facility, including the locker rooms. The course has hosted the RBC Canadian Open a record 28 times, including this year.

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Rob, Keaton and other family members stayed in Oakville for the week and Keaton was able to attend the golf tournament, the first Professional Golf Association event he has been to in person. The tournament was held from July 27 to 30.

The skills competition was held on July 22 and the local golfer finished third out of the five golfers in his age group. He finished two spots higher than he was ranked going into the competition. Rob said he is “very proud of these guys.”

By these guys, the father was talking about Keaton, his older son Kyler and his stepson Cort Tunall. He noted that Tunall also won the skills competition in Swift Current for his age group, but didn’t have enough points to qualify for the national contest.

Keaton said it was the first time he had competed in such a skills competition but he knows a golfer who went to the national contest in 2016. He noted that he could have scored better in Swift Current and Oakville, but the experience has given him confidence and motivated him to continue to improve his game.

The young golfer said being in the skills competition was nice, but he was more excited about getting to play the course and to watch the pros a week later at the RBC Canadian Open. He played the back nine holes at the historic golf club.

“It was pretty cool,” he said of playing at Glen Abbey. He said the grass on the fairways was as short as grass on the greens of some courses and the greens were fast even though they’re not the fastest greens he has played.

As part of the Golf Canada experience during the skills competition, the young golfers got to play one hole with a professional golfer. By the luck of the draw, Keaton got to play a 150-yard par three hole with Dustin Johnson, the current number-one ranked golfer in the world.

The seventh hole was turned into a hockey rink-style experience complete with a penalty box for fans, and Keaton used a putter shaped like a hockey stick on the green. When walking from tee to green with Johnson, Keaton said he asked him questions.

“I asked him what his longest drive ever was,” he said. Johnson told him his longest drive at the time was slightly more than 400 yards and Keaton pointed out that he broke the mark at the 2017 Bridgestone Invitational when he drove the ball more than 430 yards.

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