Telegraph photo by TOM KING Plenty of golfers have been at Nashua Country Club the last three weeks under the new state guidelines, which can help club officials have an idea of what it will look like when it hosts the State Am July 6-11.

NASHUA – The State Am is coming to the city, and it may be a little bit different this summer.

Nashua Country Club is in the midst of preparations with the New Hampshire Golf Association to host arguably the state’s top golf event set for July 6-11.

“We’re ready to go, ready to host it,” NCC head pro Jason Malcolm said. “We’re excited to have it. It hasn’t been here in I think eight or nine years (2011). The course is in great shape.”

There’s been a lot of work behind the scenes, but with the pandemic and the state guidelines for golf, this could be a New Hampshire State Amateur championship, the 117th, unlike any other. Just like, as NHGA Executive Director Matt Schmidt will tell you, his organization’s entire tournament schedule.

Schmidt says NCC is “a great host site to be sure, and we’re excited about coming back to Nashua.” Schmidt said that NHGA officials actually had communication with NCC officials in the weeks leading up to the shutdown. NCC created a championship committee to work with the NHGA to make sure both were on the same page.

“That’s really a huge bonus for us,” Schmidt said. “Despite everything else that’s going on, the club has 100 percent bought in, they want us to be there. … We’re as close to 100 percent as we could be that we will be (at NCC) on the sixth of July.”

Both Schmidt and Malcolm have said that the great unknown is what the restrictions will be come July. The NHGA and NCC staff had a meeting a few weeks ago, Schmidt said, about how the pandemic will impact the event.

“It all depends on the guidelines,” Malcom said. “We might be coming down to the wire hopefully with the guidelines.”

“Really we’re just playing everything by ear,” Schmidt said. “It sounds like everybody is doing a good job with these Phase 1 guidelines at this point. We’re waiting to see if and when we get to Phase 2 and what that’s going to look like, because a lot of that will determine exactly how the championship runs, and how close it looks to the championships of past years.”

A couple of key issues are tee time intervals and single rider golf carts. With tee time intervals 12 minutes apart, that may mean the NHGA might have to cut down the qualifying field from the usually 156 players for the first two days which are medal play. Tee times are usually at nine minute intervals.

“If that weren’t to change by the time July rolls around, we’d really need to re-evaluate how we’re running the championship in terms of the total number of players, and how we’re getting everybody out there efficiently over the first two rounds.”

Indeed, the Monday and Tuesday rounds would be the difficult adjustments. Once things head to match play on Wednesday, and the field is down to 64 players, “The whole event becomes a lot more manageable,” Schmidt said. “We won’t change the number that qualifies for match play, but it would have to be a smaller number that show up on Monday.”

Schmidt said the NHGA would have to come up with what it feels would be a manageable number. “We’ll have to find what that magic number is,” he said. “We haven’t gotten to a number yet on that.”

And the next issue would be golf carts. Usually the golfers head out in threesomes, but if the state guidelines still say one to a drive cart, that could be an issue.

“That puts a big burden n the club and the NHGA to having enough carts for people,” Schmidt said. “We’ll have to find a work-around if we can’t have multiple people in carts come July.”

“Matt and I will get creative if we have to,” Malcolm said. “We have 65 total carts and we’ll have to get creative if the guidelines stay as is.”

Malcolm said the idea of perhaps renting extra carts would be too expensive a proposition.

Schmidt and Malcolm said the NHGA will conduct a site visit by the middle of June. By then, Schmidt said, there should be a good idea of what the state guidelines will be for early July. The number of qualifiers, he said, needs to be set by the time the first qualifier event is held on June 22.

“We need to be able to say ‘This is what the field is going to be, this is how many qualifying spots there are’ before anyone tees it up in a qualifier,” Schmidt said.

Four or five weeks ago, Schmidt said, it seemed the odds were tilted toward no State Am at all.

“It’s really been a balancing act for us in the last eight weeks,” Schmidt said. “We’ve been trying to advocate for the industry, and for the game, get golf courses back open and to do it as safely and responsibly as we could. And at the same time, trying to figure out how our organization was going to pull off as normal a season as we can.”

The NHGA pushed most events out of May, and also cancelled the New Hampshire Open, which has a field mainly of golfers from out-of-state.

“But we didn’t feel there was anything stopping us from having a tournament season in the ‘new normal’ we’re living in at this point.

“We were committed to making sure we could have all of our events to the extent we can, and certainly tops among that list was the State Am. I think that was something everybody wanted to make sure we did what we needed to do so the Am happened.”

Schmidt said that the NHGA will go event by event, day by day, and also try even more to consider the individual needs of the clubs that are hosting their events. Malcolm, meanwhile, said the last two-plus weeks of the re-opening has given NCC a good idea of what things may be like in the next six weeks.

“Yeah, a little bit,” he said. “Everything’s been running smoothly. And the course is in great shape.”

“Everybody’s been working their tail off,” Schmidt said, “to make sure this works.”

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