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Cottonwood Hills blows field away
The numbers spoke for themselves earlier this month at the Senior Four-Ball Championship, hosted by the new Cottonwood Hills Golf Club near Hutchinson. The winning total of 145 was the highest in the history of the event…by three strokes. The 69 turned in by the winning team of Randy Vautravers and Dakin Cramer was the highest final round score by a winner in 20 Senior Four-Balls.
Randy Vautravers & Dakin Cramer

   Rated second in difficulty in Kansas only to Manhattan’s Colbert Hills, Cottonwood Hills showed plenty of bite both days of the 2008 event. And Mother Nature played a role as well, nearly blowing the field and the KGA staff off the course the first day of the event and playing a factor as teams wound down their rounds on the second afternoon.
   “Randy and I play together a lot and have a good friendship and that helps in this environment,” a drained Cramer said from the comfort of a sofa in the facility’s temporary clubhouse. “He knows what to expect from me and I know what to expect from him. We’re very happy, obviously, with the end result. We didn’t leave a whole lot out there.”

Getting even
   If you would have had to pick a horse for this track prior to the Senior Four-Ball, Vautravers and Cramer would not have been a bad one. Used to playing in the south central Kansas wind and seasoned by playing golf overseas, the Flint Hills National duo felt right at home. As right as home as you can feel when winds howl over 50 mph and you have a golf club in your hand.
   “That was the hardest day of golf I’ve ever had,” the seasoned Vautravers said. “We played really hard. We didn’t play really well, but we played really hard. And we talked about it; we thought if we started playing good we’d have a chance. We kept ourselves in it to give ourselves a chance. We posted fairly early and we weren’t disappointed with 76. But we bogeyed two downwind par 5s; that was ridiculous. We made some serious errors. But everything else, we played pretty good.”
   After the four-over-par round, the champs said they were surprised they were as many as four shots behind first-round leaders Steven Kaup and David Gourlay of Manhattan at 72. So with a mindset of getting back to level par, Cramer and Vautravers went to work on Day Two. Breaking from the gate quickly, they got off to the start they needed when Cramer holed a 25-foot putt for birdie at No. 1.
   The team three-putted one of Cottonwood’s firm, undulating greens at No. 2, but bounced back with Cramer’s 8-foot downhill birdie putt at the 141-yard, par-3 fourth. Cramer kept the momentum with a 15-footer for par at the fifth and Vautravers got the team to two-under for the day with a birdie at the par-5 eighth.

   “We were both playing good golf today; we weren’t out of holes like we were yesterday,” said the 59-year-old Cramer. “Randy hit the shot of the round on (No.) 8. He hit a big drive, had about 205 yards to the green and hit a 5-iron up and over the trees to the left. It landed about 25 feet short of the hole, took a hop and careened off the flagstick, got part of the hole and ended up about 15 feet past the cup.”
   Vautravers, 52 and in the printing business in Wichita, made it back-to-back birdies on the par 5’s, reaching the 514-yard tenth in two and two-putting from about 20 feet to move the team to three under for the day. After watching his partner make a 15-foot par putt at No. 13, Cramer drilled a six-iron to 8 feet and made birdie at the 419-yard par-4 14^th.
   That moved the team to four-under for the day and their target score of even par for the championship. They were then able to play the tough Cottonwood finishing holes with a little cushion. A bogey at the difficult par-4 18^th was little matter in what turned out to be a five-stroke victory for Cramer and Vautravers, who picked up his first KGA title.
Steven Kaup & David Gourlay

   Kaup and Gourlay saw their day go south on the back nine of Day Two and finished in a three-way tie for second at 150. Joining them at that figure were Jerry Reid of Kansas City and Paul Keller of Great Bend (73-77) and Berwyn Sasek of Lenexa and Gary Roles of Overland Park (73-77). Six teams were another shot back at seven-over 151.Topping the gross/net division at the Four-Ball were Leawood’s Ray Borth and Belton, Mo.’s Bob Eils at 154 gross/135 net. That was a shot better than the Wichita duo of Scott Waltman and Gary Richardson at 155 gross/136 net.

Gone with the wind
   With winds roaring over 50 mph at times on the first day, golfers found it hard to stand up, let alone make good swings in the dunes of Cottonwood Hills. So bad were the gusts that they blew the starter’s tent down on the first hole and probably made championship officials glad the hospitality tent near the driving range had been anchored with heavy John Deere equipment.
   “We have played in these types of conditions growing up in Wichita and we also have been fortunate enough to play golf in Ireland in this kind of environment and Randy and I both enjoy the challenge of playing in adverse conditions,” said Cramer, the 2003 KGA Senior Match Play champion. “Actually, I think that contributed to our ability to score the score that we did. Because we didn’t let the weather disappoint us.”
   The conditions and the difficulty of the course made the mental side of the game even more critical, Vautravers said.
   “You had to really think and we discussed a lot of shots because the golf course demands that,” he said. “It’s tough. You had to think about every shot, with the wind, into the wind, it didn’t matter hitting everything short because it’s going to release when it hits the green. You cannot spin the ball. You can’t do it.”
   Kaup and Gourlay, who both play out of Colbert Hills where the latter is director of golf operations and general manager, stayed out of trouble in their first round and that was the biggest factor in an even-par round of 72.
   “David and I had never been on the golf course, so it was kind of an anomaly our score that first day because everybody said we weren’t going to break 80 and we kind of thought that too,” Kaup admitted. “The 72 was a surprise to both of us. We were on the first tee, and we said ‘let’s shoot 75 and we’ll be right in the thick of things.’”
   Kaup said the team made several 4- and 5-foot putts in the round. Gourlay added he was used to the wind, but the gusts in the opening round were over the top.
   “Fifty mile an hour winds are never okay,” he said. “It was fun…it was a challenging tournament. You really had to use your head, that 6 inches (between your ears) and sometimes we weren’t using it.”
   Reid and Keller, who grew up in windy western Kansas, had three birdies in the first round and that was a big difference. The tandem failed to birdie a hole in the second round.
   “You get a birdie and you get a little expectation going, a little bounce in your step and it helps quite a bit,” said Reid, a retiree out of Sunflower Hills in KCK. “(After yesterday) we planned on winning, and after seven holes we planned on winning. We missed a couple of putts on (Nos.) 8 and 10 and kind of let it get away after that.”
   Roles and Sasek, whose KGA senior resume includes winning the last two Senior Team Championships with one coming at Colbert Hills, put themselves in contention for a Senior Four-ball title with a one-over 73 on Day One. But changing conditions in the second round led to a few poor shots on the back nine and that led to a 77.
   “On the front side it seemed like a normal, windy day,” Sasek said of round two. “But then back on the back side it kicked up a little bit and our swings sort of faltered a little bit. And we started tensing up a little bit and we let a few holes get us.”

Comfortable at Cottonwood
   With 85 acres of maintained turf, including 50 acres of zoysia fairways, four acres of Crenshaw bentgrass greens and three acres of bentgrass tees and plenty of tall fescue roughs, and staff of just an assistant superintendent and three full-timers, 28-year-old Danzey Nickel has taken on the charge of maintaining the Cottonwood Hills course as superintendent.
   The Kansas State University graduate took over just two months prior to the event but had the course in championship condition. He works from a temporary office, has a small shop with fenced-in yard and just enough equipment to get by for now.
   “The biggest thing is trying to drain the course in the spring when the water table is up,” Nickel says. “Our drainage isn’t as effective, because the water has no where to go. Through the summer, the water table goes down, the drainage works excellent.”
   Nickel says one of the biggest changes he’s had to get used to in his new position is the number of outings to get prepare the course for.
   “We have corporate outings through different businesses in Wichita and Hutchinson…also just state-wide organizations…in the last couple weeks, the Kansas Young Bankers Assoc. There are a lot of tournaments out here,” he says. “…dealing with 40 to 50 tournaments a year, whether it be a Monday through Friday, Saturday, Sunday. We have to be ready and willing to prepare the course at any given point for the tournaments that we host.”
   Nickel and staff maintain 82 bunkers on the course and he says it takes about 10 hours to prepare them. As is typical in new construction, some of the bunkers have contamination, and that’s an issue his staff with deal with over time. Currently, and for the foreseeable future, the staff will continue to ride mow greens at the Cottonwood Hills, Nickel says.
   “It takes five (hour’s labor) every morning to ride mow the greens. We figured up it would take close to four times that to walk mow and with the golf economy, it’s a situation where it wouldn’t pay off for us,” he says. “We feel like with our John Deere riding greens mowers we’re getting close to the same quality of cut as walk mowing.”
   Moving from Tamarisk Golf Course in Syracuse, Kan., where he spent the last five years, Nickel says he and wife, Randa, wanted to move farther east in the Sunflower State and they felt Hutchinson might be a good stop. Randa is a Kindergarten teacher in the nearby Buhler School District.
   “I was just ready to work at an 18-hole course,” said Nickel, twice a member of state champion teams in high school. “My wife and I are from western Kansas and we like it out there but we’ve always wanted to live a little further east, so there are different amenities available to us and our kids. Hutchinson is an area she’s always liked, as a kid coming to the state fair. It felt like a good fit to come to Cottonwood.”