Reed On The Greens
November 16, 2023
by Jeffrey Reed, Editor, LondonOntarioGolf.com
File Photo: Junior Tyson Tour competitors at Fanshawe Golf Club, by Jeffrey Reed/LondonOntarioGolf.com
Wednesday and Thursday of this week mark a very busy time for West Haven Golf and Country Club head golf professional Scott Loosley. With unseasonal high temperatures, the northwest London private golf club has been bursting at the seams with golfers getting in their last rounds of the season.
“It’s an extremely busy time, to say the least,” said Loosley, now wearing an additional hat as chair of the newly-formed Junior Tyson Tour executive committee. “I laid off all of my staff this past weekend, because we were supposed to be closed for the season. But with this great weather, we’ve re-opened. So I’m here in my office, and working as the cart jockey plus manning the pro shop, with more than 100 golfers on the tee sheet Wednesday and over 130 on Thursday.”
But when this scribe called Loosley to chat about the Junior Tyson Tour, he was more than happy to spend a half hour talking about new plans for Canada’s oldest junior golf loop (est. 1968).
The winning team at the Sarnia Golf and Curling Club 45th annual Charity Pro-Am (L-R) Scott Randall, Tyson Tour’s Scott Loosley, Scott Hartley, Greg “Punch” Stuart
The much-travelled Loosley has taken the Tyson Tour reigns from Steve Bennett, recently retired from his post as director of the City of London’s municipal golf system. Bennett, as well as retired Highland Country Club head golf pro Mike Silver, remain on board as tour consultants.
The new committee sees Highland head golf pro Rick Pero, as well as former St. Thomas Golf and Country Club general manager Rob Mason, the region’s Golf Ontario representative who now acts as a golf instructor at Highland, join Loosley in moving the Tyson Tour in a new direction.
Call it a coming of age party for the much-respected junior loop.
In Loosley, the Tyson Tour has a new leader with a credible links background. The 34-year-old PGA of Canada member from Exeter made his bones under Bennett at Thames Valley Golf Club, and has worked at Provo Golf and Country Club in Turks and Caicos under Sarnia’s Dave Douglas. Loosely also worked at Woodington Lake Golf Club in Tottenham before moving to West Haven.
Loosley’s father is RiverBend Golf Community general manager and executive golf professional Simon Bevan, who helped introduce his son to courses including St. Thomas G&CC, Greenhills Golf Club, Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville and Grandview Golf Club.
Loosley said he is fortunate to have had two strong mentors in his life with Bevan and Bennett in his corner.
“Steve (Bennett) and I are extremely close,” said Loosley. “He is a strong mentor and someone I lean on all the time for advice. We golf together often, and I call him whenever I need to. I worked for him for four years at Thames Valley, and I am fortunate to have him pass the Tyson Tour torch to me as we have some exciting things in the works for 2024.”
Junior Tyson Tour 2023 champions. Photo courtesy Junior Tyson Tour.
A badly-needed new website is under development, and there are plans to up the Tyson Tour game with use of social media platforms for the first time – an important step for engaging with teenaged golfers. A new online scoring system will use the newly-developed SMART Golf platform, developed by Londoners Rob Sunstrum and Mitch Kemp.
Update: The new Tyson Tour website is up and running here.
In addition, the committee trio will post online golf videos for Tyson Tour competitors who Loosley said will “be able to learn more about the game, its rules and regulations and its etiquette. And we’re assembling a volunteer base who will assist us at tournaments with things like scoring, rulings, looking for lost golf balls and avoiding any cheating on the golf course.”
Like any junior loop, the Tyson Tour has been hampered from time to time with etiquette issues – score fixing, kicking golf balls out of bushes, all things you would expect from kids – but the new committee is now taking those problems seriously, Loosley said, in order to further uphold the status of Canada’s oldest junior golf tour.
There’s more money behind the Tyson Tour, too, with Canada Life’s Senior Vice-President, Insurance and Independent Distribution Mike Cunneen (Tyson Tour champion in 1994) spearheading $5,000 in year-end bursaries, and the Fanshawe College Golf and Club Management program continuing to offer annual bursaries to competitors. Loosley said the committee will continue to look at new community partnerships, too.
Growing Pains
File photo: Tyson Tour competitors at Fanshawe Golf Club. Photo: Jeffrey Reed/LondonOntarioGolf.com.
The Tyson Tour is steeped in history. In 1968, former London Free Press sports writer, Bev Tyrrell, established the Tyson Tour which borrows its name from the Ty in Tyrrell, and the son part from his twin boys, Tim and Tom. For more than half a century, the Tyson Tour has provided junior golfers in Southwestern Ontario with an opportunity to compete in a tournament setting, while learning life’s lessons through golf. And, it has awarded more than $100,000 in bursaries since its inception. It’s the oldest tour in Canada with organized competitive golf for kids, and includes amongst its past winners 2003 Masters Tournament champion Mike Weir.
The annual Les Thomas Memorial Tournament, reduced to one day in 2022 and ’23 instead of the traditional two-day event at the City’s Thames Valley and Fanshawe golf clubs, will return to a two-day stroke-play event in 2024, said Loosley. First staged in 1981, the tourney is named in honour of the former Golf Ontario director and commissioner of London’s Public Utilities Commission in the 1970s. Thomas was a big backer of junior golf in London and area. Weir captured that event in 1986 and ‘87.
After a two-year layoff during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Tyson Tour counted a full field of 72 competitors registered for six stops in 2022, with eight girls, and 64 boys (28 bantam, 21 juvenile and 15 junior) teeing it up at Southwestern Ontario clubs. There were comparable tee sheets in 2023 – something the committee says it must grow with a renewed community presence in the works. And with the girls competition typically a two-golfer race, as it was again this season with Andra Lai of St. Thomas G&CC repeating as champion, Loosley says it’s up to the committee to work hard in order to grow the field.
However, he admits that is a monumental task across the golf board.
File photo: Junior Tyson Tour high jinks at Fanshawe Golf Club. Photo: Jeffrey Reed/LondonOntarioGolf.com.
“We’ve had trouble getting girls to play, but we’re not the only ones. It’s a national problem. We need to find a solution – make it more welcoming. I don’t think the competition side of the Tyson Tour helps as an introduction to golf. I think that scares girls away,” he admitted.
“I hear the numbers about how female golfers are helping grow the game in Canada, but I think that’s geared to ladies in their late-20s and 30s. Locally I know golf clubs are struggling to get junior girls. We’re fortunate here at West Haven to have a good junior girls membership, but they don’t compete, plus we are in a good location.”
A few years ago, Bennett introduced a non-competitive Pee Wee golfers schedule at the Hickory Nine course at Thames Valley. Loosley said the tour will return that fun format in 2024 so pre-teens can learn about the game and its etiquette in a non-competitive atmosphere, most likely on Saturday mornings.
“We hope a lot of those kids will then compete on the Tyson Tour down the road,” he said, “because it’s up to us to help grow the game with the next generation.”
Golf is a game of a lifetime, and it starts with our youth.
Taking them away from screen time and onto the golf course is, indeed, a monumental task. But with a new team and new initiatives, it appears Canada’s original junior golf tour is finally coming of age.
Ed. Note: Click here for details on the Tyson Tour reunion tournament June 20 at Thames Valley GC.
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Jeffrey Reed has promoted the local golf industry as a broadcast, print and new media journalist since 1980. A multiple writing award winner from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada, Reed is author of the 2018-published book, The Canadian Seniors’ Golf Association, Celebrating 100 Years of Seniors Golf 1918-2018, now housed in the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame and Museum library. A London Sports Hall of Fame nominee, Reed – through LondonOntarioGolf.com – presents the annual Heart Award (est. 2011) to a member of the Southwestern Ontario golf industry who gives back to and helps grow the game of golf. Mike Weir (2014), Mike Silver (2017) and Steve Bennett (2020) are all past winners of the Heart Award. Reach Jeffrey at jeff@londonontariogolf.com.
