THE annual Shane Doherty Memorial Tri-State Masters returns to local golf courses this week.
The 54-hole tournament, which also provides plenty of social opportunities, is a staple in local golfing circles and, following a year off due to COVID-19 restrictions, visitors to the region are ready to tee-off.
With competition Monday, Wednesday and Friday and social games tomorrow and Thursday, and a raft of functions across the week, organiser Kym Doherty said all was looking good for a bumper week of golfing activity.
“I’ve got 180 people playing the tournament, with 95 per cent of those coming from outside of Sunraysia,” she said.
“A lot of them are bringing their wives or partners who don’t play golf so they’ll be spending time around Mildura. All we need now is to have no lockdowns and the weather to be nice.
“The only disappointing thing is we have two gentlemen who have been coming from New Zealand for the past 14 or 15 years and they can’t make it this year, they can’t take the risk of coming in and being locked down. But other than that, there seems to be people travelling again and looking forward to coming.
“Everyone is keen. I have 70 new players in the 180 that are coming which is really good for the district … hopefully they’ll enjoy it and will be back again next year.”
Doherty said her late husband, Shane, who the tournament is named after, would be ecstatic with the progress the Tri-State Masters has made since his passing in 2013.
“He would be thrilled,” she said. “It is a different demographic now to when he was last with us.
“I did actually get people at the dinner to stand up in 2019 as to who had actually met Shane, and there was probably only about 20 per cent of the people who stood up. The age demographic is probably 60 to 75, maybe a little bit older, so if you take that back over eight years, a lot of the people who were in that age group have probably given up golf now.
“The clubs are really keen to have everyone back and they’re making life easy for me in terms of organising things.
“There’s a lot of social events as well which spread across Sunraysia, so it’s not only the golf clubs that are benefiting from it, it’s the accommodation, the restaurants, supermarkets, caravan parks, everything.”
Play begins Monday at Mildura Golf Resort.
