The Garfield G-Men boys golf team finished the Mahoning Valley Athletic Conference season with a 10-2 record and won the league tournament championship on Wednesday.

By Tom Nader

Publisher and Editor

Any competitive golfer will remember a few strokes they left on the course that could have helped for a better round.

For the Garfield G-Men, they had to carry it around for an entire year.

That is not easy.

At the Mahoning Valley Athletic Conference Tournament in 2021, the G-Men finished second overall to Champion by just one stroke.

It served as a sense of motivation for Garfield.

And it worked.

The G-Men celebrated the MVAC Tournament and league championships on Wednesday with a victory over the field at Salem Hills.

The title fulfills a goal set by the team during the off-season.

“I am very proud of how focused the team has been this year on achieving that goal,” second-year head coach Doug Engelhart said.

The G-Men finished the regular season with a 12-5 overall record and were 10-2 in MVAC play.

The group has done it through consistent play from the top of the lineup to the bottom.

“What makes our team special is that on any given day, any of our top four will lead the way and the rest of the team celebrates their teammate’s success without any ego getting in the way,” Engelhart said. “They play each round as a team and make decisions on the course with the team score in mind.”

The mentality has allowed Landen Gedeon, Danny Ensinger, Liam Mielcarek and Dillan Paul to finish with the lowest score at least twice each throughout the season.

“It seems like when one of the four struggled in a match, someone else would have a great round,” said Engelhart of his balanced group.

Gedeon is a junior and has posted the team’s low score in 10-of-15 events and shoots 45 on average per round.

Ensinger, a senior, has finished the season strong and averages a round score of 47.

Mielcarek, another senior, dropped his average seven strokes this season to be at 48.

Sophomore Dillan Paul has been “the biggest surprise this year,” according to Engelhart. Paul’s freshman year was his introduction to golf and after a difficult start, he finished strong in 2021 and emerged as a viable varsity player in 2022 by making a commitment to play as much as possible throughout the off-season, which has allowed him to drop his stroke average by 10.

Junior Tyler Baczkowski and freshman Caleb Sheer also spent the season showing steady improvement.

Despite a pair of league losses to Newton Falls, the group was mature enough to bounce back quickly and it kept the G-Men in contention for the league championship.

“We focused on celebrating the positives in each round and not dwelling on the mistakes,” Engelhart said of his team’s losses to the Tigers.

With a team-first approach, individual golfers improving dramatically year over year and a motivated group looking to atone for last year’s one-shot tournament loss, it all set the stage for a special fall season for Garfield.

One they can carry around for the rest of their lives.