Deshler High golf team cuts ribbon on new simulator

Outdoor sports are at the mercy of the elements, and many of the warm months in The Shoals are accompanied by rain.

One solution is to move practice inside, and that is what the Deshler High School golf team can now do whenever necessary.

Coaches Kelli Frederick and Hal Mills, along with their team, cut the ribbon on its new golf simulator May 22 in the school’s athletic facility.

“They have a really good golf program here,” said Lee Fowler with the Chris and Patricia Burns Junior Golf Foundation. “We have an initiative to get the high school teams to help out with the elementary kids, They have done a really good job with that. They have done a lot with that service.

“They raised half the money to buy a golf simulator, and our foundation wanted to give them the other half  ($5,000) for their efforts in what they do for the kids.”

The golfers are able to tee up a ball and hit it towards a screen with a projection of a course.

The simulator measures the angle and power of the ball and then approximates where and how far it would travel on the course.

This allows the players to work on their game indoors in any weather at any time of the year.

“You don’t see this at a lot of schools,” said Tim King, who was recently named the men’s and women’s golf coach at Northwest Shoals Community College. “This allows them the opportunity to develop. This will help them tremendously.”

Fowler said helping the team purchase the simulator was “very rewarding, especially when you know how happy they are and how much they’ll use it.”

“It helps them learn their yardages,” he said.

The members of the 2024-2025 Deshler High School golf teams are Jackson Walls, Hunter Faifer, Tripp Brooks, Riley Hand, Hunter Dean, Johnson Thompson, Reece Jones, Grissom Tate, Eli Smart, Colton Frederick, Foster Waldrep, Parker Posey, Landon Sockwell, Ben Clounch, Hayley Hall, Rebekah Putman, Haylen Hall, Scout Siegel and Ella Steen.