Devin Medd earns top DSGA Scholarship award

Devin Medd’s schoolwork interfered with his playing in the state high school golf championship, but it paid off for him in other ways.

As reported here last week, Medd had to take a test May 31 and could not participate in the two-day, 36-hole event. However, his season-long contributions helped Cape qualify for the tournament, and provided valuable experience for Medd’s younger teammates. This week, the Delaware State Golf Association Scholarship Fund announced the winners for 2011, and Medd won the big prize. The Cape Henlopen golf captain and graduating senior won the Robert McCurry Award of $3,500 per year, with a total potential scholarship award of $14,000 if he maintains a good GPA during his four years of college. The top prize is named after Robert McCurry, a longtime member of Rehoboth Beach Country Club. McCurry was a major automobile executive with Toyota Motors, and a huge supporter of junior golf in both Delaware and California.

Will Nauman of Milford won the Mike Tobiason Sr. Award, worth $2,000 per year. Aaron Weiner of Newark won the third-place prize, worth $1,500 per year.

Tyson Mayers of Rehoboth Beach, son of the former golf pro at Kings Creek Country Club, tied with Eric Fagan and Rickey Bell of Wilmington for the fourth-place award, valued at $1,000 per year apiece.

Ron Barrows, the recently retired head golf professional at Rehoboth Beach CC, said this year’s scholarships, contingent upon continued good scholastic performance, totaled $40,000.

Several DSGA Scholarship Fund recipients are expected to join nearly 100 other junior golfers at the upcoming Rehoboth Beach Junior Open, held at Rehoboth Beach CC June 13.

A break from tradition
My normal golf fashion sense depends on keeping to a few basic elements.

Solid-color shirts, khaki long pants, and solid-color Bermuda shorts are the fundamentals for me.

I’m not a fan of plaids or color blocking for either my shirts or my shorts. White shirts are also rarely used. That’s because I can’t seem to go for more than about 30 minutes before some kind of blotch appears, whether from coffee or a dirt-spewing golf swing.

The golf shirts, shorts, and pants are also all cotton, although I admit to a few mistaken choices of polyester when I first began playing golf in the early ‘80s.

In recent years, various vendors sent marketing materials touting the benefits of so-called performance fabrics, so I briefly checked them out.

Once I saw that these fabrics weren’t cotton, however, I shied away.

However, there’s something to be said for free samples. The folks at Antigua offered some of us golf writers a few choices from this year’s Performance Collection, and I decided to test them during the recent hot spells here in the Cape Region.

They sent a Performance Pique shirt and one from their Whisper Xtra-Lite line. Both use Antigua’s Desert Dry fabrics, designed to wick moisture away from the wearer.

The Xtra-Lite shirt also uses what Antigua calls ultra-light fabrics.

The shirts also have a very faint waffle pattern in the fabric, which may be part of the wicking feature, but which also looks pretty classy all the same.

I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised. Despite the heat, these shirts worked just as advertised. In conditions that would have soaked my normal cotton shirts, these stayed mostly dry, and remained noticeably light-feeling as the rounds ended.

The suggested retail prices are in the low to mid-$60 range, and the items are available at local golf outlets and several pro shops in the Cape Region.