BY MARK MORING, Eastern Shore Post —
Two years ago, Nandua High School didn’t even have a golf team. Next week, the Warriors will be vying for a spot in the Class 2A state championships.
Nandua has won five of six matches this fall — its only loss coming to powerhouse Worcester Prep last week. The Warriors will compete in the 2A Region 1 tournament Monday, Sept. 30, at Suffolk’s Sleepy Hole course, where they could earn a ticket to the state tournament in mid-October.
Not bad for a school that had disbanded its golf team after the 2017 season due to lack of interest. The Warriors had had good golf teams in the past, including back-to-back regional-title-winning squads in 2002 and 2003, led by Ben Murphy. And the school’s best all-time golfer, Ben Morgan, finished second in the state, by just one stroke, in 1998.
While Nandua was absent from the golf scene, two local boys, David Hughes and Toryn Ibarra, took up the game as youngsters. Both were mainly playing with their fathers, Paul Hughes and Jaime Ibarra, but by the time they were in eighth grade, they were itching to compete against kids their own age.
So Paul Hughes formed the Eastern Shore Youth Golf Club in May 2022, relying on donated clubs, bags, and shoes from people all around.
The youth club, which meets at the Eastern Shore Yacht and Country Club, got off to a slow start. But by the end of that first summer, they had about 18 active kids — more than enough to field a high school team. Unfortunately, the deadline for that fall had already passed, so they had to wait another year.
In the fall of 2023, with the elder Hughes as coach, the Warriors won the Eastern Shore District tournament title, handily beating Arcadia and Chincoteague.
This fall, Nandua’s five wins have come in multiple matches against Chincoteague and Salisbury Christian. (It’s difficult to find small area schools with golf teams, so the schedule is pretty thin. Arcadia and Northampton didn’t have enough players to field teams this year.) Still, Nandua’s record and scores are strong enough to qualify for the eight-team regional tournament, where the top two teams — and the next six top individual scorers — will advance to states.
“These kids have been amazing,” says the elder Hughes, Nandua’s coach. “I can’t stress enough how I’ve enjoyed seeing them all grow.”
Hughes wants to impart some life lessons along the way.
“Golf is a great lesson for life because it’s about overcoming adversity,” he says. “You can’t do anything about what happened on the last hole, or what happened yesterday. But you can have an influence on your attitude for the next hole, or for tomorrow.”
Toryn Ibarra and David Hughes, both juniors, are captains of this young team, which has just one senior, Kyler Vasquenza. There are also nine juniors, a sophomore, and a freshman. Three of the 12 players are girls.
Ibarra, the best high school golfer on the Shore, averages 40.7 strokes over nine holes, and often shoots in the mid-70s for 18. What makes the team so strong is that there are at least six other players capable of breaking 50 over nine holes — Hughes (46.6 average), Grayson Ford (46.8), Vasquenza (48.6), Landon Joynes (49.1), Sonny Rudigor (50.5) and Matthew Taylor (51.66). Monday’s regional tournament is an 18-hole event.
“Everybody on the team is friends, so we’re all having a good time out there,” says Ibarra, whose father, Jaime, is an assistant coach for the Warriors, and whose sister Leslie, a 2016 graduate, was a star golfer at Nandua.
Ibarra says it’ll be difficult for the team to finish in the top two at regionals to qualify for states.
“I don’t think we’re quite there yet,” he says. But individually, Ibarra should have a great chance to qualify. He missed it last year by just three strokes, and he has cut at least six strokes off of his average since then.
Still, having the team qualify for regionals is a tall task, considering their youth and that it’s only the school’s second year since its restart.
At last year’s regionals, the younger Hughes got a kick out of surprising some of the teams on the “mainland.” “I think the people across the bay were shocked,” he says. “They were like, ‘Where did Nandua come from? Who are these guys?’”
They surely know who “these guys” are now.
