NORTHAMPTON — Galen and Reilly Fowles will tee up with Team Connecticut when the seventh PGA Junior League Championship kicks off, Friday.
The Northampton brothers are members of a 10-person all-star team that will compete with 11 other teams at Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Arizona.
The tournament runs Friday through Monday.
Team Connecticut placed first at the Northeast Regional round to advance. It beat Team New England, Team Northeast and Team New York at Watertown Golf Club in early September.
The four teams competed in a series of round-robin, nine-hole matches.
Connecticut finished with 26½ points, 10½ more than second place.
“At Regionals you can easily say we dominated,” said Galen, a seventh-grader at JFK Middle School. “You know we beat the second-best team by 10 flags.”
Galen said the strategy they used at Sectionals and Regionals worked out pretty well for them.
“Trying to get one on the fairway. If that one is good then we just try to hit the next one as far as we could for the drive, or we play one safe on the green and go aggressive with the next shot,” Galen said. “You’re also trying to go aggressive and put it closest to the pin. For your approach shots, chip shots, putt shots it doesn’t always work out but when it does it’s definitely worth it.”
Reilly, 11, and Galen, 13, started playing the sport not long after learning to walk.
“At about 18 months they were whacking little plastic golf balls in the basement of our house with plastic clubs,” said Derek Fowles, their father.
What started as an activity to bond the brothers blossomed into something bigger. The two began to show continued interest in the sport.
“Eventually they could literally just spend two to three hours out there and they were only 3 or 4,” said Adrian Fowles, the boys’ mother.
Watching from the sidelines, she is proud of what her sons have accomplished on their own.
“As a parent it was just amazing to watch off the bat,” Adrian said. “We’re seeing them go through these steps they would do as a golfer all the time, but doing it all by themselves and making really good choices about how to play a hole.”
Jim Bunel, who has coached the brothers for the past four years, has been impressed by their teamwork.
“The best attribute that they have is their ability to work together as brothers,” Bunel said. “It’s really impressive to see them go together and be able to keep their composure and work hard together.”
Even at a young age, the boys had strong preparation skills and a desire to improve.
“There were a lot of times when myself or another colleague would say (to students) ‘why don’t you take out a notebook and write that down,’ and that really wasn’t the case with them. It was kind of just constant,” Bunel said. “They heard something they liked or something that helped, it was an instant where they grabbed the notebook and wrote it down because they wanted it to stick for a while.”
Teammates
Galen and Reilly complement each other on the golf course. The brothers have been paired together for their tournaments.
“I would tell you that up to this year, if you could take Galen’s long game, iron play, driver, all that stuff and put it together with Reilly’s short game, you’d have a super-human on the golf course,” Bunel said. “Galen is just so scary long and consistent with his iron play and Reilly is just a magician around greens. He’s really really good, he makes a lot of putts.”
During the summer the brothers, who play out of Crumpin-Fox Club in Bernardston, practice as much as five times a week. Now that school has started, Galen and Reilly practice twice a week in order to balance school work and golf.
The weather has also cut into practice time as they prepare for nationals.
At the championship, the teams were split into two six-team divisions — Ryder and Wanamaker. Like at Regionals, teams will play round-robin, nine-hole matches using a two-person scramble format.
Connecticut is in the Ryder Division with California, Washington, Virginia, Ohio and Louisiana.
The Wanamaker Division features Delaware, Arkansas, Texas, Georgia, Illinois and Minnesota.
The two teams with the best records will play for the championship on Monday. Second-place teams will compete for third place.
“It’s gonna be the hardest for the Northern teams to prepare for that one because it’s going to be early November when we’re leaving for Arizona,” said Reilly, a sixth-grader at JFK Middle School. “So talk about some hot weather practices.”