Here at GOLF.com, we don’t condone kicking someone when they are down, but we do love this playful punishment one high school golf team used to penalize its highest score.
Vanderbilt’s Gordon Sargent, the 2022 NCAA individual national champion, was this week’s guest on GOLF’s Subpar Podcast, and Sargent chatted about his freshman success at Vandy, college life, what kids his age think of the new LIV Golf tour, and lots more.
He also explained the hilarious way his high school golf team, Mountain Brook High School outside Birmingham, Ala., punished the score that didn’t count at tournaments.
For those who aren’t in the know, for high school events (and college), only a handful of scores are used to make up the school’s team score. Usually it’s the four best from a team of five or six. The scores not counting are dropped. That’s how Sargent’s squad came up with “dropped-score interviews.”
“We had an Instagram account and we did dropped-score interviews, so if you were the dropped score you had to do an interview of like why you were the dropped score,” Sargent said.
“It was like a three-minute video of just the person going through their round and explaining why they shot the highest score on the team. … They were like funny ones too. Just kind of messing around a little bit, because you know how high school golf is. There’s anything and everything going on. They were pretty good.”
If there’s anything more infuriating than having a bad round on the course, it might be having to relive it and explain just why it was so bad. Or perhaps it was therapeutic?
You can check out Sargent’s entire Subpar interview here.
As GOLF.com’s managing editor, Berhow handles the day-to-day and long-term planning of one of the sport’s most-read news and service websites. He spends most of his days writing, editing, planning and wondering if he’ll ever break 80. Before joining GOLF.com in 2015, he worked at newspapers in Minnesota and Iowa. A graduate of Minnesota State University in Mankato, Minn., he resides in the Twin Cities with his wife and two kids. You can reach him at joshua_berhow@golf.com.
