Barbin is just too good as he rolls past Fricke to capture title in BMW Philadelphia Amateur at Whitemarsh Valley

 

   Five years removed from a dominant summer of junior golf, Austin Barbin of Elkton, Md. completed a dominating run to a BMW Philadelphia Amateur crown Saturday with a 9 and 7 victory over Aaron Fricke in the scheduled 36-hole at Whitemarsh Valley Country Club.

   Playing out of the Chesapeake Bay Golf Club that is owned by the Barbin family, the 23-year-old, a recent graduate of Liberty University, zoomed to a 7-up lead following the morning round by blitzing the George Thomas classic layout in Whitemarsh Township with, allowing for the usual match-play concessions, a brilliant 5-under-par 67.

   Fricke, playing out of LuLu Country Club, couldn’t so much as win a hole until the seventh hole in the afternoon, the 25^th of the match. He added another win on the next hole, but that only trimmed what had been a 10-down deficit to an 8-down deficit.

   And the 29-year-old, a Denver, Lancaster County resident who was a standout for head coach Ben Feld’s Drexel Dragons, can play.

   Fricke defeated his partner on LuLu’s BMW Golf Association of Philadelphia (GAP) Team Matches first team, Michael R. Brown Jr., one of three players who have won the career grand slam of GAP major championships, in the quarterfinals and Philadelphia Cricket Club’s Mark Miller, the 2007 Philadelphia Open champion, in the semifinals.

   But on this day, Barbin was just too good.

   Barbin got an early momentum shift in his favor when he converted an 11-footer for par after his tee shot found a greenside bunker on the tough 241-yard, par-3 fourth hole. Fricke was in the same bunker and had nine feet for par, but couldn’t get his par putt to fall and found himself in early 2-down deficit.

   It was off to races for Barbin after that as he picked up wins on the sixth and seventh holes and then just missed a hole-in-one at the short par-3 ninth, his tap-in birdie giving him a 5-up advantage. When he holed a seven-footer for par at the 416-yard, par-4 finishing hole, Barbin had a 7-up lead.

   His advantage would grow to 10-up before Fricke picked up those back-to-back wins at the 25^th and 26^th holes. But that was just delaying the inevitable and Barbin closed out Fricke on the 29^th hole.

   You could have seen all this coming five years ago when Barbin won the GAP Junior Boys’ title at Coatesville Country Club on his way to being named GAP’s Junior Player of the Year. He performed on national stages that summer in the U.S. Junior Amateur, the Boys Junior PGA Championship and the U.S. Amateur at the Pinehurst Resort & Country Club, site of this week’s U.S. Open.

   Older brother Zach Barbin won two of GAP’s major championships in the pandemic summer of 2020, the BMW Philadelphia Amateur at Lancaster Country Club and the Patterson Cup at The 1912 Club.

   Zach and Austin Barbin are the fourth set of brothers to put their names on the J. Wood Platt Trophy and the first since Overbrook Golf Club’s Thompson brothers, the late great Ray, the winner in 1972, and Andy, a two-time champion in 1986 and again in 1998.

   Austin Barbin’s week began last Sunday when he captured the Maryland State Golf Association Amateur Championship. His father Andy was on the bag for both victories, a pretty nice run-up to Father’s Day for Team Barbin.

   “It was just a really special week, a long week,” Austin Barbin told the GAP website. “I didn’t have my best stuff the previous days, but today I really had my ‘A’ game. I knew if I had my ‘A’ game, I was going to be tough to beat. I’ve had different swing thoughts and swing feels every single day of this tournament. That’s not usually how I roll.

   “I was really close to where I wanted to be with my swing. (Friday), I went home to Chesapeake and got on some video and found a really good feel and rolled with it this morning. I was confident with it and here I am.”

   For the first time, the winner of the BMW Philadelphia Amateur earns an exemption into the U.S. Amateur, which will be held in August at Hazeltine National Golf Club in Chaska, Minn.

   If Austin Barbin had plans to turn pro, he might want to remain an amateur a little longer to take advantage of that opportunity.

   He closed out his college career at Liberty by helping the Flames capture the Conference USA crown in their first year in the league. That earned Liberty a trip to last month’s NCAA Stanford Regional. Now, Barbin’s added titles in the Maryland Amateur and in the Philly Am, in its 124^th year, a championship as old as the U.S. Open.

   Golf, as he pointed out earlier in the week, is just part of the family for the Barbins. It’s what they do.