After achieving success in back-to-back tournaments in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Olympia, Illinois, the FSU men’s golf team is on the road to American Dunes, Grand Haven Michigan. There they will compete on a Jack Nicklaus designed course in the Folds of Honor Collegiate.
Folds of Honor is a non-profit organization that financially supports the education of family members of a disabled or fallen service member or first responder. Lieutenant Colonel Dan Rooney founded the organization after seeing firsthand the toll of losing a family member in action on his return flight from Iraq. Beginning in 2007, the organization has awarded several scholarships.
Jack Nicklaus is the founder of Folds of Honor and designed the American Dunes Golf Club specifically to benefit the organization. He waived his entire design fee for the construction of the course. Closer to home, Nicklaus recently oversaw the re-development of what is now Seminole Legacy Golf Club.
Coming off a final round shooting 64 in the OFCC Fighting Illini Invitational, Cole Anderson is drawing lots of attention. However, Anderson redirected the attention from his personal game to the cause the guys will be playing for this weekend.
“There’s a lot of things in life that are more important than golf,” Anderson said. “We live in a country where we can go chase our dreams in just about whatever we see fit; Without them [service members] that’s not the case. For us to be able to play in this event, and take part in this…It’s something very special and something we definitely don’t take for granted.”
Anderson put the importance of the weekend into perspective. This weekend, golf is the vehicle for a far greater cause.
“We’re just honored to be a part of it, to help and to give back—whether it’s the first responders or veterans—any little thing we can do,” head coach Trey Jones said. “It’s just a great association between Florida State, our golf program, and the great cause.”
The team traveled to Grand Haven this Saturday and will begin tournament play Monday, Sept. 26.
“We don’t call it the off-season, we call it the pre-season,” Jones said. “That’s what the fall is about—to help us address where some of these players are, how much they’ve improved from last year, how we can help them improve to start the spring. Ultimately, when we get to the postseason we want to be clicking on all cylinders.”
Jones is equipping his players with all the necessary tools to hit the ground running this spring.
“We’re going to have to be great,” Jones said. “We have to be good to compete at the level we want to be at.”
In order to prepare for the spring, it is important for the team to play in back-to-back tournaments as seen with these past three weeks. The tempo of the spring schedule is rapid. Fitting in nine to 10 tournaments in a 15 week semester is no joke. The guys usually find themselves returning late on Sunday nights, doing laundry only to put it back in a suitcase and shipping out again on that Wednesday.
“The fall has been pretty fast and furious this year,” Anderson said. “You kind of know the drill coming in. We make sacrifices for sure, but it’s what we all want to be doing. Coming up here in a few weeks, we have a good chunk of break in the off-season that last year we didn’t have. We finished a little later in the fall. We’re just all trying to put in as much work as we can for these few weeks. We’ll get some time to relax and be normal college students for at least a couple weeks.”
This schedule includes balancing classes, even when the team is gone most of the week. Tournaments like the Folds of Honor Collegiate help remind Cole Anderson and company that golf is their platform to do so much more.