Old Rochester golf team takes home state championship win

Oct 31, 2022

For the boys of the Old Rochester Regional High School Golf Team, this will be a season to remember.

After playing an undefeated season, racking up 14 wins, the golf team finished by taking home the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletics Association Division 2 championship title on Tuesday, Oct. 25 at the Maplegate Country Club in Bellingham.

“As confident and prepared as we were to win a state championship, the win does still feel a little surreal,” said team captain Markus Pierre, who shot 75 in the state tournament.

Pierre was the second scorer on his team. Philip le Gassick took the top spot on the team — and second in the tournament — shooting a three-under par 69. Braden Yeomans came up third with 78 and Peter le Gassick was fourth with an 80.  

Brady Mills and Gabe DeBlois also played, scoring 83 and 85 respectively. Their scores were not used in the team’s win. 

According to Pierre, the road to the championship was paved with hard work and determination. 

“We started practicing a week before the start of school and we practiced or played almost every day leading up to the final,” he said. “A big part of golf is practicing and training parts of your game that need work. This year, each person had a high golf IQ and understood what they needed to do to get better.” 

Pierre remembers how he felt in the moments after the championship game. 

“In an event like this everyone swarms around the scoreboard and people are calculating and trying to find out incoming scores — this is exactly what my teammates were doing,” recalled Pierre. “I sat back and just tried to soak it all in no matter the result.”

But he emphasized that golf is truly a team sport. At a post-victory Chick-fil-A stop, Pierre told the team that “the reason we were able to win this year is because there was less pressure on each person. We all trusted each other’s abilities. We trusted that our teammates had our backs and that they [would] post a good score to help us out.”

In this golf tournament, the six strongest players on the team competed, said ORR Golf Coach, Chris Cabe. Then, the four best scores were used to calculate the team’s overall placement in the tournament.

“This championship was a product of all the hard work the players have put in over the past couple of years, during the season and during the off season,” Cabe said.

Now that they have won the state championship, the team has the chance to play in Frisco, Texas, in the 2023 High School Golf National Invitational Tournament from July 17 to 19. 

“We are really excited to have one more tournament to play and [to] just have an awesome trip with each other,” said Pierre.