In any other year, Golf Manitoba would have honored its outstanding volunteers for achieving significant milestones and it’s top performers on the links at the Annual Awards Reception.
But as has been the case for pretty much all things since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, alternate methods have reigned supreme. So on Wednesday afternoon, the award winners for 2020 were recognized digitally.
Top honours went to 20-year-old Bobbi Uhl of Shilo who was named Manitoba’s Top Female Golfer, and 18-year-old Neel Soni of St. Charles who was selected as Manitoba’s Top Male Golfer. Both had sparkling resumes.
Uhl, who is in her junior year at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia, captured the Manitoba Women’s Match Play Championship in June at St. Charles. A couple of weeks later she literally came within inches of forcing a playoff for the Manitoba Women’s Amateur title at Bel Acres in an epic final round showdown against the eventual winner, Veronica Vetesnik of Kingswood.
Uhl spoke with Christian Aumell on the 680 CJOB Sports Show a few hours after finding out she had won during a golf practice with her team. “I knew that it was going to be announced shortly after we started so I kinda mentioned it to my coach and she was keeping an eye on it. And then when she saw the results, she said to me ‘I know if you won or not.’ So I said ‘Are you going to tell me?’ I was really excited — at first, I didn’t believe it.”
Uhl says she has always loved the match play format because a bad hole here and there doesn’t have the same impact as it might in stroke play. “It’s like, oh – I made a double (bogey) – there goes two shots. In match play it’s like – oh I made a double and they made a par. Oops, it’s only one.”
And it worked, with Ulh winning the match 4 and 5 against the very same opponent she had just come up short against in the two previous Match Play finals. “It was really big, because the last two years it’s been me and Hannah in the finals, so this year to be able to pull off the win, it was just really nice to know that I could do it,” said the former two-time Manitoba Junior Women’s champion. “I guess the third time was a charm for that too, as well as winning Player of the Year.”
Soni captured his first Provincial Junior Men’s Title by just a one-stroke margin over Breezy Bend’s Braxton Kuntz at Selkirk in mid-July. Just one day later, the first-year UBC student was back on the links at Minnewasta in Morden for the opening 36 holes of the Nott Auto Corps Manitoba Men’s Amateur. Neel told the 680 CJOB Sports show there was a significant difference going from 54 to 72 holes.
“There’s definitely a difference in dynamics when you’re playing a four-day event and a three-day event. And then of course, obviously with the amateur you have a little bit of a deeper field where you’ve got a lot of guys who can shoot really good scores versus the juniors, where there are still some guys who can shoot really good scores but there are less of them. So I guess the expectations are a little bit different when you’re entering a bigger field like the amateur. You don’t want to get too ahead of yourself.”
Soni is a big believer in taking a ‘one shot at a time and one round at a time’ approach and that mindset helped him carve out a second-place finish, three strokes behind the eventual winner Marco Trstenjak of Elmhurst. “I was hoping to win the event, but of course you only want to focus on what you can do. Especially in golf where you can’t really control all the outcomes.”
Not a bad philosophy for a guy who is taking biomedical engineering, and was actually writing a first term paper when the announcement of his selection was made by Golf Manitoba. Soni is looking forward to next season when he can join his new team, and attend classes at the Point Grey campus of UBC. But in looking back, there was a particularly impactful moment the coronavirus pandemic had on him personally — the opportunity to represent Manitoba in the Junior Interprovincial competition.
“Unfortunately for me, the National Junior Team, this would have been my last year to participate because I’ll be turning 19 in the summer next year. So I guess that one stings a little bit more than the National Amateur,” admitted Soni. “I know definitely with all the things that have gone on in the last year, I’m really happy to have had at least a little bit of competitive golfing. Golf Manitoba did such a great job of allowing us to have a few competitive events, and making sure they did it in a safe way.”
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