Finding summer golf courses in the desert
Finding summer golf courses in the desert
Trae Cassell laughs a bit when he calls himself the can’t-miss kid who missed in a brief pro golf career after graduating from Clayton State College in Georgia.
“I turned pro out of college and tried to go play mini-tour golf, and it took less than six months for me to realize that I can’t eat three meals a day at McDonald’s because that’s all I could afford,” Cassell said.
Now 55 and having regained his amateur status in the late 2010s, Cassell has rediscovered both his love for golf and his ability to play at a high level. All of that will lead him to the U.S. Senior Amateur Championship in San Antonio next week. It’s his first appearance in the U.S. Senior Amateur, which has an age requirement of 55.
“It’s an absolute thrill. Anybody who has ever picked up a golf club has had this dream or vision of hitting enough good shots to do something with it,” Cassell said from his summer home in Rancho Santa Fe. “So it is an absolute thrill.”
Cassell’s desert connection comes at Madison Club in La Quinta, where he has sold real estate since 2007 and been the director of real estate sales since 2018.
For Cassell, qualifying for the USGA national championship is the latest step in returning to a game he basically abandoned for more than a decade. After leaving touring golf, Cassell turned to club pro jobs at prestigious clubs like East Lake in Atlanta, Oakmont in Pittsburgh and Bel Air in Los Angeles. But that ended after a little more than a decade as his own desires for life changed.
“When I got out of that, I quit playing golf, except maybe three or four times a year socially,” Cassell said. “I got married, had kids and probably the better part of a decade, I didn’t play. I played no competition golf for 12, 13, 14 years, but I played very little golf for the bulk of sort of my good years.”
Then came the idea to get his amateur status back and play some amateur golf.
“When you get to be this age, in my opinion, amateur golf is the way to go,” Cassell said. “To have fun and compete when no one is trying to make a living. It’s just getting the competitive juices flowing again and seeing who is playing the best golf.”
Cassell believed he had the talent to compete as an amateur, or at least as a senior amateur. It was regaining the competitive mindset that was a bigger concern.
“It’s hard getting back into the competitive environment,” he admitted.
But he did find his game and his competitive juices, all leading to a victory last year in the California Senior Amateur Championship at Monterey Peninsula Country Club. Since then, Cassell has four more top-five finishes in large senior events, including a second place in the Golfweek Senior Division National Championship, a second place in the Society of Seniors Senior Masters and a fifth place in the Southern California Golf Association Senior Amateur.
To qualify for the U.S. Senior Amateur, Cassell tied for second at a qualifier at Soule Park Golf Club in Ojai, firing a 68 to take one of fourth berths into the national championship.
Cassell’s concern now is trying to train his game for what he’s told is a tight, tree-lined course at Oak Hills Country Club.
“Rancho Santa Fe, where I play all my golf over the summer, has a different design philosophy. It was designed to give lots of room and keep you in play,” Cassell said. “There aren’t a lot of trees framing fairways. There are not a lot of bunkers to force you into spots. I have to somehow get comfortable hitting less than driver, but there will be times when it is driver, where I’ve got narrowly framed landing areas.”
The championship feature 36 holes of stroke-play qualifying Aug. 23 and 24, with the low 64 players advancing to match play starting Aug. 25.
As for the future, Cassell insists he has no interest in professional golf, but he’d like to play as well as he can in the amateur events he does play. His world amateur golf ranking of 518th gives him plenty of options for tournaments in the next year or so, if he finds time to play in them.
“Anybody who plays in these tournaments, you want to win,” Cassell said. “And if they are going to rank us, you want to be the highest ranked guy.”
Read the full article here
