If you were following all the action in the PGA Championship at Aronimink Golf Club in Newtown Square, and if you’re reading this blog, I’m guessing you were, you heard the name of Donald Ross come up over and over again.
In an age when guys can drive it 350 yards, it is still the green complexes of the master, Donald Ross, that gave Aronimink its best defense.
You didn’t see guys going for the pin much because the way greens are designed with quadrants and slopes going this way and that, it just doesn’t make sense to try to stick it close.
It resulted in a lot of carefully struck 40-foot putts with guys forced to be firm going uphill, but knowing full well that, at some point, their putt was going to be going downhill.
Pretty sure it was lost a little in dustbin of history that Jeffersonville Golf Club, owned by West Norriton Township, was a Donald Ross design.
Pretty sure it was a local design geek who was able to dig up the original plans for the course and realized it was a Ross, although if you’ve ever played there, the green complexes give it away.
When the Golf Association of Philadelphia decided it should stage one of its major championships, the GAP Middle-Amateur Championship, at one of the regions many fine public course facilities for the first time in its history, it ultimately settled on Jeffersonville.
The GAP Middle-Amateur Championship, a two-day 36-hole test for players 25 and older, tees off Wednesday.
West Norriton has invested in the property over the last two decades and it now, rightfully, lands on any number of lists of top public courses in Pennsylvania.
My annual family golf outing, the prestigious McNichol Cup – well, not that prestigious, but we always have fun – has been held at Jeffersonville the last few years and I can report that it’s not unusual, even in a scramble format when, after a couple of tries, you know what’s it going to do, to see four putts go sailing past the hole and off the front of the green.
I can also report that, after a couple of years that caused a few detours on the cart paths, the new clubhouse at Jeffersonville is complete and they did a fantastic job with it.
GAP President Ken Phillips connected the dots a little and saw that the GAP Middle-Amateur would come right on the heels of the PGA at Aronimink with all the Donald Ross talk in the air, and that made it an easy decision to turn to Jeffersonville as the first public course in the region to host a GAP major.
The staff at Jeffersonville is a little anxious, but thrilled to see Jeffersonville be the stage for one of GAP’s biggest events.
“We’re super proud to be the first public course to host a GAP major,” Jeffersonville superintendent Rich Shilling, a 47-year-old Gilbertsville resident, told the GAP website. “We’re a little bit nervous. When it was announced that we were gonna host the event, we had a lot of plans to do some projects over the winter. The winter wasn’t ideal, but the team and I pushed through it.”
The defending champion, Little Mill Country Club’s Troy Vannucci, will be an obvious favorite.
The 34-year-old Vannucci won his first GAP major in 2022 when he captured the title in the GAP Middle-Amateur at Jericho National Golf Club.
A year later, Vannucci’s consistency was rewarded when he was named GAP’s William Hyndman III Player of the Year for 2023.
Vannucci added another GAP major to his resume when he captured the Joseph H. Patterson Cup in 2024 at Concord Country Club.
With his second Middle-Amateur crown a year ago at Riverton Country Club, Vannucci has clearly become the dominant mid-am in the Philadelphia area and a Middle-Amateur Championship at Jeffersonville should be right in his wheelhouse.
Vannucci has teamed with Andy Butler of Huntingdon Valley Country Club to capture the title in the Philadelphia Publinks Golf Association Donald Ross Better-Ball Championship each of the last two summers.
It’s a little short at 6,259 yards from the tips and playing to a par of 70 for as far as these guys hit it these days, but there’s still those Ross green complexes to navigate.
“I’ve probably played here a dozen times,” Vannucci told the GAP website while touring the course in advance of the Middle-Amateur Championship. “This is one of my favorite courses. It’s a lot of course knowledge. There’s a lot of good holes with tough greens and good complexes.”
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