Keffer Has Dominant Perfomance at Third Corona Premier® Pro-Am of 2023
Englewood, Colo. – The Colorado PGA Section (COPGA) held its third Corona Premier® Pro-Am Event today at The Club at Inverness in Englewood, Colorado. Host PGA Professional Dave Steinmetz and Eddie Dean, Course Superintendent, deserve a big thank you for their hard work to have the course playable on Monday after over 5 inches of rain last week. The players were greeted with a cooler damp mist when they arrived in Englewood on Monday morning. Those cool, damp conditions gave way to partly cloudy skies and temperatures in the low 60s throughout the afternoon.
The Club at Inverness is already a challenging golf course, playing to a Par 70, but add the wet conditions, thick rough and it was a true “US Open” type test for the 42 PGA Professionals who teed it up. The course was showing its teeth during the morning shotgun with the best score coming from Tyler Parsloe, PGA of Jake’s Academy, firing a 1-over-par 71. Even with the better conditions in the afternoon, the course still created problems for the players, except for 1 Colorado PGA Professional veteran, Geoff Keffer, PGA, of Lakewood Country Club. Keffer was dialed the entire day, hitting 13 of 14 fairways, and 15 greens which helped him card 6 birdies without a bogey for a 6-under-par round of 64. The Inverness victory is Keffer’s first this season but he hasn’t finished outside the top 8 in his other 4 events, so a victory was not far off.
The team competition on Monday was a 1-2-3 Net contest, with each team needing to take 1 score on the Par 3 holes, 2 scores on the Par 4 holes, and 3 scores on the Par 5 holes. The difference between first and second in the team leaderboard was a closer race but the Team of Keffer, Lonnie Barnhouse, Sam Marley, and Frank Wilson took the top spot with a 15-under-par total. Patrick Clary, PGA, Breckenridge Golf Club, and his team took second place with an 11-under-par total and a three-way tie for third at a 9-under-par total rounded out the podium.
The Corona Premier® Hole of the Week was on the Par 3 3rd hole at Inverness. The 178-yard hole has water, short and right of the green, and an undulating green sloping from back to front. This hole forces the players to hit a committed iron shot if they want to find the putting surface and have a look at birdie.
Monday’s Pro-Am at Inverness was host to over 170 players and is only the third of 15 Corona Premier® Pro-Am events during the 2023 Colorado PGA tournament season. The Corona Premier® Pro-Am Series has two weeks off as the section runs its Myran Craig Pro-Pro Championship and the Pro-Official Championship, with the Pro-Am’s picking back up on Monday, June 5th, at Fort Collins Country Club in Fort Collins, Colorado.
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