Three from area in state title field

As the Georgia Amateur Championship tees off today for the 90th time, participants can look back on a rich heritage that stretches all the way to a 14-year-old rising talent named Bobby Jones winning the inaugural event in 1916.

And as the field of 144 golfers start today on the North Course at Atlanta’s Cherokee Town and Country Club — the 72-hole tournament will be cut to the low 70 and ties after two rounds — they will no doubt do their best to link themselves to the legacy that comes with earning the title of the state’s best. That group will include Dalton’s Hudson Keener, Will Morrow and David Noll Jr., who have all known success to some degree on the golf course but would no doubt be happy to add this tournament’s title to their trophy case.

Noll, the 2010 Georgia State Golf Association Men’s Player of the Year and a six-time winner of that award, already has one trophy from this event, having taken the 2003 Georgia Amateur Championship. And he’s also been a consistent threat to repeat the feat, finishing second in 2005 and 2009 and recording his sixth straight top-six finish in 2010, when he took sixth and was six shots behind winner Lee Knox of Augusta.

Noll — who shot the tournament’s low 18 last year with a second-round 66, which gave him a five-shot lead at the time — has been good enough, in fact, that he could have earned an exemption into this year’s tourney on five different criteria.

Keener, meanwhile, comes into the tourney after another strong year at LaGrange College, including his second straight NCAA Division III All-America selection after finishing third in the national championship tournament in mid-May in Greensboro, N.C. He also won the Great South Atlantic Conference and Reeder Cup individual championships as a junior this season, was selected to the PING Southeast All-Region team and was chosen as the Great South Athletic Conference Player of the Year.

Keener finished in a six-way tie for 38th place at last year’s Georgia Amateur Championship, bookending strong middle rounds of 67 and 72 with a pair of 81s.

Like Keener, Morrow qualified for this year’s tournament by shooting a 79 at Pinetree Country Club in Kennesaw last month. Unlike Keener, he does not have the experience of last year’s tournament to count on at Cherokee Town and Country Club.

However, Morrow, who graduated from Dalton High this year and will play college golf at Atlanta’s Oglethorpe University, has shown the ability to play with confidence on the course. His 75 was the team’s best round when Dalton High won its 25th region title in program history in April at Ringgold’s WindStone Golf Club, and also had a 75 as the Catamounts finished in the top 10 at the Class 3A state tournament in May.

But Keener, Morrow and Noll all face the task of a highly competitive field, with past champions Danny Yates and Bill Bergin also playing, along with three other 2011 GSGA tournament winners — Cason Hammock (Georgia Four-Ball Championship), Greyson Sigg (Georgia Junior Championship) and Mark Strickland (Georgia Mid-Amateur Championship).

The North Course will play to 6,860 yards and a par 70 for the tournament, with the longest hole the 587-yard, par-5 No. 9 and the shortest the 188-yard, par-3 No. 2.

• Although he won’t be playing in the Georgia Amateur Championship, another former Dalton High golfer, Chase Miller, had a strong freshman season at College of Coastal Georgia and is trying to carry that momentum over to his summer tournament schedule.

Miller was The Daily Citizen’s 2010 All-Area Spring Team Boys Athlete of the Year after he earned Region 7-4A medalist honors and helped the Cats to the region title as well when they took a playoff against Murray County. This year, he helped Coastal Georgia finish fourth at the National Junior College Athletic Association’s Division II tournament, where his 10th-place finish was good for All-America second-team honors and he had a hole-in-one to help lead the Mariners.

Last week, he finished in a four-way tie for 12th in a 176-player field at the 61st Golden Isles Invitational at Brunswick Country Club, a 54-hole event. Miller went 71-71-73 for a 1-under finish.

In a press release from Coastal Georgia’s sports information department, Miller said, “I feel like the whole tournament went well, but feel like I could have done better. I wasn’t hitting it well at all the last day, so to shoot 73, I guess was pretty good.”

The tournament was won by Dru Love (the son of pro golfer Davis Love III), a rising senior at Frederica Academy whose skills are known to Christian Heritage’s golf team, which has seen Love and Frederica up close in three trips to the Georgia Independent School Association state tournament. Love shot a course-record 62 in the final round of Golden Isles, joining his dad on the tournament champions list — Davis Love III won the 1985 title shortly before turning pro — and Miller was paired with him that day.

Next week, Miller will test himself at the Southern Golf Association’s Southern Amateur Championship, scheduled for July 13-16 at Innisbrook Golf Resort in Palm Harbor, Fla., near Tampa.

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