2013 Stableford winner Graham Coulton & caddie Sue Carpenter

2013 AUSTRALIAN STABLEFORD CHAMPIONSHIPS

Champion	Graham Coulton (Sue Carpenter)	NSW	79 points
Runner-Up	Sean Witting (Michael Lewis)	VIC	77 points

CLASSIFICATION WINNERS

B1	David Blyth (Gary McInnes)	VIC	69 points
B2	Gary Sargent (Eileen Sargent)	NSW	75 points
B3	Rod Mills (Roger Blackmore)	NSW	72 points

Overall I thought this was again a very successful event

Positives

• A good field of 19, about the most we can expect in our major events these days
• Camaraderie amongst the participants in my view was excellent
• Speed of play yesterday -we achieved our objective of getting the entire field through in under 5 hours
• Playing in groups of 3 and 2 is much better than playing in 4's
• Admin arrangements in my view went very well. This is a credit to Doug Sloan who puts this event together with very little assistance. Thanks Doug. The transport in particular worked excellently, the quality/quantity of the food at both the Welcome Night and yesterday's Presentation was great.
• The Rules Officials in Heather Whitford/Arthur Wade were firm where required, but sympathetic
• The 20-odd "volunteers" from 6 Adelaide golf clubs arranged by Heather Whitford were helpful - and 20 more golfers in SA are now aware of blind golf which can only be of benefit to us in the long term. Hopefully most of them will return next year, and we can make more use of them given more planning time
• The course was in excellent condition, and I make no apologies for playing the men off the blue tees. Yes it made the course much longer on Thursday, but there were still some excellent scores on the first day. The "blues" were moved forward on most holes on Friday. I would prefer this not to happen, but we have no control on a public course!
• The Adelaide Shores pro shop couldn't have been more helpful, even though we took far too long on Thursday. They had a few complaints from "angry" (and I know they were angry personally!) public golfers, but the pro shop sorted this out.

Negatives

• Speed of play on Thursday. 5 1/2 hours is just too long on a busy public course. All sorts of reasons for this including a bad start on the first hole, 13/19 players using carts (I believe that instead of making golf faster, carts - unless they are used correctly - actually slow the game up, and carts weren't used correctly on the Thursday!) and players just taking far too long on club/shot selection. This was largely rectified on Friday
• We didn't get the lunches out as planned on Thursday. I need to monitor this more closely as we had a couple of diabetics playing or caddying!

Take care

Geoff