Ever So Close

Team representing CGA/Colorado comes closer to victory than it ever has at Pacific Coast Amateur Morse Cup competition, falling 1 stroke shy of top spot

By Gary Baines 

The Morse Cup team competition has been held every year but one since 1967. Never in all that time has a team representing the CGA and Colorado come as close to winning as it did on Wednesday in Livermore, Calif.

The Colorado squad took a one-stroke lead into day 2 of the 36-hole competition that features 16 teams from the western U.S. and western Canada. And though the team from the Centennial State stayed near the very top of the leaderboard all day on Wednesday, it ended up in second place, a mere stroke behind the champions representing the Northern California Golf Association.

With the top two scores from a three-player team counting each day toward the team total, the Coloradans ended up at 10 under par for 36 holes after posting a 4-over tally in Wednesday’s round.

The scores of Colin Prater of Colorado Springs and Thayer Plewe of Cortez (63-72 in both cases) counted for Colorado both days, while 18-year-old Miles Kuhl of Boulder posted rounds of 69-78.

It marks the sixth time Colorado has finished second in the Morse Cup at the Pacific Coast Amateur — 1982, ’83, ’92, 2011 and ’22 being the others — but this week was the closest the Centennial State has come to victory.

The individual competition at the Pacific Coast Amateur will continue through Friday. Individually, Prater and Plewe share 10th place at the halfway point of the Elite Amateur Series event, but are just three strokes behind leader Aidan Lee of Pasadena, Calif.

For all the scores from the Pacific Coast Amateur, CLICK HERE.

About the Writer: Gary Baines has covered golf in Colorado continuously since 1983. He was a sports writer at the Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder, then the sports editor there, and has written regularly for ColoradoGolf.org since 2009. The University of Colorado Evans Scholar alum was inducted into the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame in 2022. He owns and operates ColoradoGolfJournal.com