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Sterling’s Gellerman shines all summer
   2009 KGA Junior Player of the Year

   Was there ever any doubt about this one? A Kansas prep golfer who had already won two state high school golf championships by the end of his sophomore season continuing his fine play into the summer and eventually being named Kansas Golf Association Junior Player of the Year?
   That’s the case for Sterling’s Michael Gellerman. The 17-year-old set his golfing sights on

earning the honor and then went out and did it this past summer, tallying 750.2 points in the KGA Junior Player of the Year standings. That was more than 200 points ahead of his partner in a KGA Junior Team Championship-winning effort -- Elliott Soyez of Florence. Hutchinson’s Thane Ringler, who knocked off Gellerman in the finals of the Junior Match-Play Championship, was third, another 100 points back.
   “It was really my goal at the start of the year,” Gellerman said. “I thought that if I played well, played consistently, that I would have a good shot. It was a lot of fun trying to win, competing with everyone. Hopefully I can do it again next year…we’ll give it a try.”
   Gellerman says he knows how significant winning the honor is, especially in light of the fact the junior talent in the Sunflower State just keeps getting better and better.
   “There are so many good golfers, and there are good golfers everywhere…” he said. “…but in our junior tournaments you see kids that have never won before up on the leader board, and maybe they don’t win, maybe they do. But that just goes to show you there are so many good players at a given time and anybody can win.”

Solid summer of golf
   Working on a major grip change this season, the highlight of Gellerman’s 2009 KGA summer of golf came at early-July’s Junior Team Championship at Eagle Bend Golf Course in Lawrence. Teaming with buddy Soyez, the two young players blitzed the field under the Clinton Lake dam with a 10-under 134 total for two days and walked away with a three-shot victory. The duo had just come off a day when each player shot in the 60s at a KJGA event at Salina Municipal.
   “I think our best-ball score would have been about 63,” Gellerman said of the day when Soyez carded 65 and Gellerman had a 66. The two built on that momentum, opening the Junior Team with a best-ball 65 and never looked back.
   In June’s KGA Public Links Championship at Newton’s Sand Creek Station, Gellerman had a one-over 73 on the first day and that got him into the second-to-last grouping for the final Michael Gellerman

round. The threesome included University of Kansas Head Golf Coach Kit Grove and Wichita State’s Zac Potter. Unfazed, Gellerman shot the field’s low round of the day with his even-par 72 and wound up tied for second.
   “I played average the first day…I struggled in my first competitive round,” he admitted. “But I shot one over par at Sand Creek and there’s nothing to complain about that. The second day I got paired with Zac Potter and Coach Grove and it was windy, a really tough day. I shot even, a 72, and I felt really good about that.”
   With the exemption he’d earned at the Junior Team, Gellerman shot rounds of 71 and 75 to reach the match-play portion of the Kansas Amateur in late July at Kansas City Country Club. The young player was seeded 29^th but dropped his first-round match to Public Links champion Steve Newman in 20 holes. But Gellerman’s considerable game made an impression on the accomplished Kansas mid-am player.
   “It was close the whole time…I was just really impressed with how strategically he played for a young kid,” Newman told KG Online after the match. “Most young kids I play with just bomb it and they’re real aggressive the whole way. And he was just not that way at all. He played smart shots; he played smart lines. He played good, smart shots into the greens. He played like he knew what he was doing.”
   Gellerman’s fine summer included his second straight runner-up finish at the Junior Match-Play Championship, this one coming at Cottonwood Hills Golf Club near Hutchinson. He also placed second at the KGA Junior Amateur, firing two rounds of 71 at Emporia Municipal to finish a pair of shots back of Wellington’s Myles Miller. Gellerman added wins at the Woody Austin Invitational, at a KJGA event at Salina Country Club and the Big I State before closing out his KGA slate with a third-place finish in his first trip to the High Plains Amateur at Garden City’s Southwind.

2010 is third leg in quest for three-peat
   Gellerman says he started playing in KGA events when he was about eight years old and medaled in one at the age of nine at an event in Hesston.
   “I shot like a 43 I think,” he recalled.
   Gellerman won his age division at sectional events every year from age 10 to 13. As a 10-year-old he shot 37-37 to win the event at Independence. He had 32-36 at Hutchinson’s Carey Park as an 11-year-old and when he was 12 he won again at Hesston, this time playing from the white tees.
   “I think I shot 71-71,” said Gellerman, who also added a win at Pittsburg’s Crestwood Country Club as a 13-year-old, shooting 76 the first day and riding a hot putter to a 66 in the second.
   In the summer of 2008 he was still recovering from a broken wrist suffered while playing basketball. He finished sixth in the points standings to qualify for the Kansas-Nebraska Cup teams. Gellerman reached the finals of the Junior Match-Play Championship before falling to Phillipsburg’s Jeff Jarvis in the title match.
   The broken wrist barely had given the Sterling player time to get his swing in shape for the spring golf season. But that mattered little as he won the 2A state championship at Buffalo Dunes Golf Course in Garden City. He had a one-under 71 to claim the title and begin his quest to become a four-time Kansas state high school champion. In the spring of 2009, Gellerman made it back-to-back state wins, firing a one-under 70 at Wichita’s Tallgrass Country Club to snatch the 3A crown.
   He’ll go for three in a row next spring.
   “I’m going to give it a try…I don’t even know where state’s at this year,” he said. “I think I heard something about Hays. I think Jarvis was telling me that. I think it’s at Hays and I’ve never been out there.”

With a low in the low 60s
   Gellerman says his introduction to golf came when he would follow his father Jerry to the course when the family lived in Tucson, Ariz.
   “My sister is just a year older than me and she would always be with my mom so my dad, every time he went golfing, he would take me with him so I pretty much grew up on a golf course,” says Gellerman. “My first plastic set of clubs I got was when I was about two years old I believe. The first metal club was when I was about three, a really short, cut-down club.”
   The family moved to Kansas soon there after. Gellerman began playing on the Sterling nine-hole course and his game developed rather quickly. In his first tournament, played at the age of seven, Gellerman shot a 45 on the Lyons course and won.
   “And there were kids that were probably 13 in there,” Gellerman says. “So I remember that.”
   Gellerman says he was shooting par on the Sterling course by age 13. A day before the 2007 Junior Amateur in Emporia, Gellerman shot a 64 at Sterling…and that’s not even his personal best.“I think I’ve shot 61 out there now,” he said.
   Gellerman has never had a swing coach. He says his father, who works for Laird Noller in Hutchinson, knows his swing very well and can analyze any problem.
   “He can look at my swing and tell where the ball goes without looking where the ball goes,” Gellerman says. “He knows everything about my golf swing and I’ve never taken a lesson.”
   Also a big support for Team Gellerman is Michael’s mother. Julie Gellerman, who works for the Sterling School District, can be seen following the youngster at most of his events. The fourth member of the Gellerman clan is Michael’s sister Jamie, a freshman engineering student at the University of Kansas this fall.
   “She is very smart,” says Michael, who is a member of National Honor Society, the S Club and works with FCCLA on projects with youth in the community. “So it’s a pretty high standard.”
   Michael Gellerman, also a member of the Sterling High basketball team, says he’d like to play Division I golf in college one day and if he does that he’d like to give professional golf a chance. He says he’s worked on the mental side of the game, not getting so upset when things aren’t going well.
   “In the past my weakness had been my mind…I’d get way too mad and take things way too seriously,” he admits. “I’m still working on that. I still go through spells, which aren’t even close to as a bad as they used to be. I’ve worked on that vigorously.”
   “My putting has come a long way this year. I don’t know if it was good, but it’s gotten a lot better this year. My ball striking and my iron play have always been my bread and butter. I’m looking forward to playing college golf. I’d like to play Division I…I’d like to play in the Big 12. A lot depends on who will let me play on their team.”