VICTORIA, BC — Greg Koster has lost count of how many golf tournaments, big and small, he has won over the years. “I did a count a few years ago and I was close to 130,” the Courtenay resident said.
“I have been doing this a long time and when I was a young guy there were tournaments on this Island every weekend if you wanted to travel and play them and I did do that for years. That is how I got ready for the big ones, I would enter a bunch of small ones leading up to it to peak at the right time.”
This week, at Highland Pacific Golf Course, Koster won a couple more of the big ones as he closed with a three-under par 68 to capture the B.C. Mid-Amateur and Mid-Master Championships.
“I am going to be on cloud nine all the way home tonight,” Koster said. “I am very excited to win this one.”
The soon to be 54-year-old really wasn’t expecting to be heading home with two more championships to add to his long list of titles. His game was rusty.
“I knew my game was still there, but I just really hadn’t played all that well this year, so I wasn’t sure if I was going to find it in time for the tournament. But I did. I managed to do that. I had a little time off before I got down here which helped my back for sure and it just all came together.”
Koster, who plays out of Sunnydale Golf Club, also wasn’t sure if Highland Pacific was a fit for his game. Visually stunning, the course has lots of elevation change and twists and turns that require patience and accuracy. Stray too far from many of the fairways and there’s plenty of trouble to get into.
And then there are Highland Pacific’s slick greens, which have plenty of slope and put players on the defensive who get above the hole.
“I didn’t know this course at all when I came down here,” Koster said. “I played one practice round and I was a little concerned that maybe this wasn’t the right course for me. But after the first round I got more comfortable and after the second round I really believed I could do this today. I felt like I knew where to hit it. It’s a lot of picking targets and cutting corners and things like that. You just need to commit to your lines and everything else and I did a good job of that today.”
Koster finished the 54-hole event at even-par, one-shot better than Vancouver’s Nasheel Kassam. His brilliant final round included only one hiccup that came on the par 4 14th hole, which in a twist of irony is rated as Highland Pacific’s easiest hole. And it looked like it was going to be really easy when Koster striped a perfect drive straight down the middle of the fairway.
But he pulled his wedge approach shot into a left greenside bunker, barely got his next one out of the sand and then three-putted for a double-bogey. “It was a no-trouble double,” Koster said with a chuckle.
“I knew I was four-under at the time and knew I must be close and it was just painful because the shots were so bad. But I got to the next tee and I told myself, you would have been happy to be standing on this tee at two-under for the day and you are swinging it great, so put it behind you and keep going.”
And that’s exactly what he did. Koster made a solid par on the 15th hole, then rolled in a 20-footer for birdie on No. 16 that helped make that double a distant memory.
The Mid-Amateur is for players aged 25 and older, while the Mid-Master is open to players aged 40 and older. Koster won the 2010 Mid-Amateur after being a runner-up in 2007. He captured the Mid-Master titles in 2012 and 2018.
These days he’s thinking a lot about senior golf. He’ll be 55 next summer and eligible to tee it up in the B.C. Senior Men’s Championship. That’s one of the big reasons he decided to head down the Island to play at Highland Pacific. Koster wants his game to be in tip-top shape to begin his senior career.
“That is kind of why I decided to come and play this one this year. I wanted to get back into it because I haven’t been playing many of these the last bunch of years. I bought a new property and built a house and I’ve had a lot of fun doing that. The golf has kind of gone on the back burner. But with this being on the Island and I have been working a lot of hours at work I just wanted a week off, so I said I am going to play that golf tournament and get ready for senior golf. Lo and behold I found my game right before I came here.”
Koster gave credit to his old set of PING i20 irons, which he put back in his bag for this event. “My irons have always been my strength,” he said.
“I have been looking for new irons because these are old and I don’t hit them very far. I got a new set but last week I decided I just didn’t have the confidence with them so I put them back in the closet and pulled out my old ones for this week. They are relics. They are old, they have the old lofts so don’t go that far, but I know where they are going. For some reason they just work for me and I am confident when I look down on them. I think they are going to stay in the bag for a while.”
Kassam, who was playing behind Koster in the final group, birdied his final hole to shoot a final-round 72 and fall one shot short. He was done in by a poor front nine when he could not buy a putt and made three bogeys.
“I was just fighting a lot of things this week,” Kassam said. “I just can’t read these greens and my speed was so bad. I would probably be bottom 50 in the field this week in putting, so the fact I was even in the mix was kind of surprising to me.”
Port Alberni’s Greg Palmer beat defending champion Wyatt Brook of Heffley Creek in a playoff to claim third spot after both players finished at four-over. Koster, Kassam and Palmer will represent British Columbia in the inter-provincial team competition at the Canadian Mid-Amateur Championship, which goes Aug. 19-22 at Seymour Golf & Country Club in North Vancouver.
Players finishing among the top 14 and ties at Highland Pacific qualified for a spot in the Canadian Amateur. Summerland’s Nathan Ward finished second in the Mid-Master at five-over par. Kris Yardley of Maple Ridge was third at six-over.
CHIP SHOTS: Koster and Brook won the event’s better-ball competition by five shots with a total of 17-under par. The Victoria duo of Kevin Carrigan and Craig Doell were second.
Click HERE for complete final scoring.