Annual ParTee Golf Club
PHOENIX ARIZONA
"We play once a year,
...every month."
ParTee'ing since 1997
The Annual ParTee Golf Club started on the third week March 1997, when Ed Anderson, Ben Cartago, Larry Centers, Pablo Peralta, and Sol Vaita played golf at Kokopelli. There was heavy betting going on and Larry lost a dollar to Sol and Ben. Larry was not happy because on the way to the course, he told Ed that they absolutely could not lose to Ben and Sol. So he challenged everybody to play again the following month.
The next month they played and the winners that day became the first team to win the first official tournament. Everybody celebrated a successful day of golf at the 19th hole where they decided to call their monthly tournament The Annual. Since that first annual tournament at Cottonfields in 1997 many changes have occurred. The second Annual had 19 players, the third had 42 players, and onward to this day, the biggest annual tournament was 98 players, distribution list is 320 members. The tournaments are now called the Annual ParTee Tournaments.
In March 1998 Ben, Larry, and Sol voted Ed to be The President of the club. Sol felt bad because Ed was doing most of the work so he volunteered to write the newsletter. The Circle of Friends was formed to run the club. Harley Cogswell, a biker, joined the circle; his skills with numbers were much needed, also his intimidation skills kept the silly golfers from causing problems. U.S. Marine Tim O'pry joined the circle, his secret skills cannot be revealed. Computer Wiz Jim Nibali joined the circle, he said, "digital highway here we come" and proceeded to create the club's website.
The Annual ParTee Club consists of men and women from many walks of life. The circle that runs the club has grown, and many have stepped up to contribute to the success of The Annual ParTee Club. Ben Cartago helps Ed and Sol with the tournament pairings, Tim O'Pry does the scorecard "dotting". Some of the women stepped in to help with registration and you see Debbie Williams collecting money along with Karen Behrens and Jenny Tobin. As the club continued to grow and handling the money became a chore, Karen Behrens stepped up to be treasurer.
Sadly, in 2008, Jim had to focus on other priorities and handed over the website to Jenny Tobin with help from Todd Doty. Todd led the push for changing the handicapping of new players to the Callaway system and has taken over calculating handicaps with help from Jon Chancellor when he's not playing.
In 2009 the Inner Circle suffered several injuries and we temporarily lost Debbie and Tim. Andy Christie stepped up to help with Registration as did Chris. We had a bit of chaos keeping up with the counting! The website lost the ability to use the clubmembers mailing list and temporarily overran it's capacity and shut down for a bit. We got it back up and running in time for the remaining tournaments and Ed had to do a lot of monkeying around to get info out to the club.
As we start 2011, we have a new president as the guys voted in Karen Behrens - leaving the Vaitas with the treasury. No one else wants to do the website management so Jenny continues as the webmaster. She moved the website to a new hosting provider given the difficulties we had with the mailing list last year and we look forward to some additional options being available on the web-page.
As you can see, a lot goes on behind the scenes with lining up the course contracts, web publishing, tournament pairings, scoring, money handling, newsletters, email communication etc. The group does this for the primary club mission: FUN . . . so, thanks for your participation and helping the AnnualPartee Golf Club reach it's goal! See you at the next Par Tee!
