As I was scraping the frost off my windshield before heading to the course, I had to question the sanity of my fellow Defendercup members. Who plays when the windchill is below 20? No one sane, that's who. But, we were about to that day. Fortunately we had a later tee time, and the temperature rose, and the wind died down some. It was indeed cold at the start, but I walked up the last two or three fairways with just short sleeves. Could have been worse.

In competition it was our very own Scott Jacobs that stole the show with his net 69 to take the win, evidently this Florida boy likes the cold? Second place went to Bradley Selph at net 71. We then had a tie for third between Jake Selph and Andrew Popelka at 74. Well done all of you, that's pretty good for week one.

In Gross play it was again Scott that was the class of the field with his score of 80. Jake's 81 was second, and Bradley's 82 was third. Fourth was Dustin at 84 and tied for fifth was two newcomers to Defendercup, Shawn Schmermund and Colin Fangman at 85. Again, well done folks as that was not optimal conditions.

Speaking of newcomers, we had a few yesterday as Shawn Schmermund, Colin Fangman, Kyle Holtmeyer, Quinn Haynes, Jim Benjamin, Mason Mccain and Devin Miller all joined us for the day. Welcome all of you, hope you had a good time. I ask all my veteran Defendercup people to introduce yourself to new people and help me welcome them to our group. I love watching our group grow. I mean, we had 26 people show up on the first of April, with stupid cold weather predicted. That's pretty awesome. I'm hoping we can break the record for attendance this year. We've had 39 people attend a single event a few times, but never got into the 40s. I"m thinking that will happen this year.

There were some rocky points to the day, as we weren't quite as organized as usual, but we'll get it together here in a week or two. After all the talk and work over the winter to get the teeboxes worked out, Willow decided to throw us a curveball on the first week by having their 'winter' tee boxes out, so that threw some confusion in there. Scooter forgot we normally only do 6 pin prizes. I didn't touch base with the people entering scores to go over the changes I made over the winter, but it seems people figured it out so I guess my changes were successful. It was meant to be easier to use.

There were plenty of other little things that could have gone better, but what fun would it be if everything just went off without a hitch? As this is also my first Story entry of the year, I'll probably just end it here this week. I'm also working on this new format so that the body of the email isn't as long and we can save these writeups for posterity. So need to work through that yet as well.

Thanks to everyone that showed for this first round of the year. It was good to see the fresh faces, and to see friends I haven't seen since last golf season.

Hope to see you all again soon!