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MAY/JUNE 08
The list of accomplishments is impressive. Three state high school tournament championships and three individual medalists. Three major Wisconsin State Golf Association titles, along with the Yule Cup. At least 10 college players, including three in Division I.
It’s a list most state golf clubs would be proud to claim. The fact that the golfers who compiled it come from a city of less than 13,000 people in west-central Wisconsin, far from the state’s biggest metro areas, and have done it all since 2002, is all the more impressive.
How has River Falls GC become one of the hotbeds of Wisconsin golf? The answer appears to be a combination of talent, a friendly club that welcomes young players and a high school coach who helped them see their potential.
The players, led by 2005 State Match Play champion Neil Johnson and 2007 State Amateur champion Travis Meyer – a duo who also won the 2004 State Bestball – have just kept coming in recent years, and they easily could add to their WSGA credits.
The run of success began with Johnson, who has turned pro and still is pursuing a professional career. He also recently became the new River Falls High School golf coach.
Meyer, who won the State Am by two shots last summer at Bristlecone Pines in Hartland, calling it the “best golf experience of my life so far,” plans to turn pro this summer after his final season at UW-Green Bay.
And he didn’t even finish as high on the 2007 state amateur player of the year rankings as his high school teammate, Tyler Obermueller (fourth), who plays for the University of Wisconsin.
“It’s been a nice run of guy and gal golfers,” said Ken Obermueller, Tyler’s father.
Tyler is one of three siblings who have played collegiately, following in the footsteps of his sister Jackie (Obermueller) Gundersen, who played at the UW from 2002-06. Bri Obermueller plays for the UW-Eau Claire women’s team.
The club’s standouts include the Loney sisters, former UW-Eau Claire standout Maggie and current UW-Stout players Morgan and Molly. Also, Josh Wells plays for Division II Upper Iowa University.
“In high school, people didn’t know anything about River Falls. It was kind of, ‘Holy cow, River Falls has all these good golfers coming out,’” said Gundersen, the golf coach at nearby Hudson High School who took her girls’ team to the state tournament last fall.
The River Falls run started with Johnson, a prep standout who then helped Gustavus Adolphus (Minn.) win the NCAA Division III title in 2004 and began winning at the state level. Pretty soon, other budding River Falls players wanted to be like Neil or, for the girls, Gundersen.
“Once you get a person to look up to, like Neil, you want to be better than that person. We built it on each other,” said Tyler Obermueller, who was WIAA Division I medalist in 2002 and ’04, helping his team to state titles both times.
River Falls players had all the competition they could handle right at home, where it seemed a game always was on with someone.
“When you play against the best like Neil and Andy Rauscher (another former college player who has turned pro), it makes everything else seem easier,” Travis Meyer said. “That’s probably one of the main reasons we’ve done so well.”
The talented players may not have developed were it not for a course “that let you play and practice anytime you wanted,” said Maggie Loney, who is working at Grayhawk GC in Scottsdale, Ariz., site of a PGA Tour stop, working on her game and contemplating turning pro. She also plans to work at River Falls GC this summer.
“The River Falls Golf Club has been great to all of us,” she added, mentioning a popular junior program at the club where most of them took their first swings. “The course is a huge part of (our success). It makes juniors and high school players feel really comfortable.”
The old-style, 6,600-yard course also challenged players in a way that may have frustrated some of them at times but made them tougher players when they went on the road. It’s the only course in the city proper, and many of them lived nearby, including the Obermuellers who lived next to the 18th fairway. Tyler Obermueller called the course, which has numerous doglegs and small greens and forces players to fade and draw the ball, “a little advantage for us.”
That little advantage also was location. With the club, which has about 250 members, less than an hour from the Twin Cities metro area, it isn’t as far off the beaten track as it sounds. Johnson, Tyler Obermueller and Jackie Gundersen played much of their junior golf in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.
A third and significant factor in the success of River Falls golfers was their high school coach, Paul Meyer (no relation to Travis Meyer). Most of the players who went on to play college golf mentioned Paul Meyer as one of the keys to their success.
For example, he watched Maggie Loney hitting balls one day as a ninth-grader, saw some potential and told her to try out for the high school team. She was so new to the game she didn’t even have golf shoes part of her freshman year on varsity. She helped UW-Eau Claire finish third in the NCAA Division III national championship in 2005 by taking fourth individually. In 2005 she also qualified for the U.S. Women’s Amateur Championship.
“(Paul Meyer) got me going. He taught me the fundamentals,” Maggie Loney said.
Travis Meyer said Paul Meyer helped him develop his physical and mental game. Johnson said Paul Meyer “turned me into a real golfer.”
“You look at all the players who went through River Falls and the only thing the same for all of them was Paul Meyer,” said Johnson, the 2005 Wisconsin amateur player of the year. “Some guys were talented, but he turned three or four guys into college golfers. He was very competitive as a coach. There was something about the way he was honest with you.”
At least for now, until he sees where his pro career takes him, Johnson has the future of River Falls golf in his hands as high school coach. Paul Meyer, a low-handicap player himself, was coach for more than a decade and led the boys to WIAA state titles in 2002, ’04 and ’05.
River Falls GC, which dates to 1929, also had two WSGA champions in the 1980s. In 1981, the club’s Dave Farley won the WSGA Match Play, and then Mark Sperling won it in 1987. The club’s Joe Springer was runner-up in the State Amateur in 1981.
For years, young golfers had been trying to match or beat Farley’s course record of 63, and Tyler Obermueller finally tied it in 2007. With their latest run of success, River Falls golfers have put their stamp on club and state golf history.
“After we won our first state high school title, people said, ‘Where is River Falls?’” Tyler Obermueller said. “They still don’t know where it is, but hopefully people will look at the record book someday and see what we did.”
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