Colton Dee practicing in Orlando, Florida in March, 2024.Supplied
Before the best professional golfers hit the tidy fairways at Augusta National next week for the Masters, a Grade 8 student from Kingston will get his time in the spotlight there. Against the backdrop of Augusta’s famous blooming azaleas and towering pines, 13-year-old Colton Dee will be among a precocious group of competitors.
Eighty children – 78 Americans, an Australian and one Canadian – have qualified to compete in the Drive, Chip and Putt final. It’s an annual televised skills competition for boys and girls, from the ages of 7 to 15, on the Sunday before the Masters begins. The kids will finish on the same 18th green where champions such as Tiger Woods have made putts to earn their green jackets.
Competitors earn cumulative points for driving, chipping and putting in this contest, and Dee is especially talented in the driving portion in his category: 12 and 13 years old. The 5-foot-8 teenager’s athleticism is credited for his natural golf swing.
Dee has been playing hockey since he could walk, most recently for the Greater Kingston Gaels U14AAA team. When he was 8, he began tinkering with golf, too – just fun outings with his grandfather at first on a par-three course. He had an impressive swing and keen interest, so his parents enrolled him in some lessons around 10. Eventually he started playing tournaments.
Just as his passion for golf was blossoming, Dee had an accident on July 7, 2022, that took him off his feet for months. He was driving a four-wheeler at a friend’s camp, when he came around a corner and collided head-on with another ATV. He was wearing a seatbelt, but his leg smashed hard off the steering wheel and split his thigh wide open. An ambulance took him to hospital in Napanee, Ont., where doctors closed the wound with 32 staples.
Treading carefully with a crater-like lesion, he needed crutches, and regular trips to a clinic to have bandages changed. The impact killed much of the tissue around the scar. Doctors were concerned about infection.
Once he was permitted to move around a little, Dee stood on one leg and swung a club lightly, hitting golf balls into a net. He hit a growth spurt and worked with a strength coach to build himself back up. He returned to hockey four months after the injury.
“I really missed doing everything with my friends,” recalls Dee, who still has a nasty scar, which he always keeps covered beneath long shorts. “So it kind of made me appreciate things more.”
He resumed golf lessons with Chris Barber, a pro at The Landings Golf Course and Teaching Centre in Kingston. Impressed with Dee’s driving distance, Barber told his parents they should consider entering him in a local qualifier for the Drive, Chip and Putt contest.
Thousands try to qualify for the big Augusta experience each year through the free events, held all over the United States. Golfers advance through local, subregional, then regional qualifiers to reach Augusta – just 40 girls and 40 boys can secure a berth, 10 in each age category. Last summer, Dee travelled to Fayetteville, N.Y., then Verona, N.Y., and finally Boston. At times, Dee says he was so nervous “I was shaking.” He won at all three stops to secure the green ticket to Augusta.
Despite being relatively new to the game and practising indoors in winter, the Canadian crushed the ball farther than anyone he faced in the boys’ 12-13 age group in qualifiers.
Dee’s longest drive at the qualifying events was 246 yards at TPC Boston in September, with wind in his face, evidence of Hurricane Lee not far away. He’s grown stronger and better since, and lately Dee’s been averaging between 270 and 280 yards with his drives, according to his father, Pat, sometimes 290. His coach says Dee has registered more than 300 yards on a simulator.
“Those are big numbers for a kid that age, it’s impressive,” Barber says. “It speaks to his athleticism. There’s a lot of potential there for sure.”
In the Drive, Chip and Putt final at Augusta last April, the longest drive in the boys’ 12-13 age category travelled 240 yards.
For the drives to count, the ball must land inside a marked grid that is 40 yards wide on the fairway. Every competitor gets two attempts, and the golfer with the longest drive wins 10 points for that skill, while the second-best gets nine points and so on. Dee hopes to tally big points in the driving portion. In the chipping and putting parts of the contest, each golfer gets two attempts at each skill, with his or her cumulative distance from the hole recorded, with the lowest numbers awarded the most points in each of those two skills, just like the drives. The competitors must perform under a bright spotlight.
“If he hits it in the grid, I have no doubt he’s going to win the drive portion again. He hasn’t lost it yet,” says his father, Pat, referencing the qualifiers. “At home, he’s been hitting into a net so that’s hard to know exact distances. We thought he better get outside and play some golf. At Augusta, he’s going to see kids who golf all year-round.”
Dee’s family chose to blend this trip with a fun family vacation, driving down to Orlando early so he could get some outdoor practice there before travelling to Georgia. He now uses the personalized Drive, Chip and Putt golf bag he earned for qualifying.
Dee won’t be the first Canadian to compete in the DCP final at Augusta National – 20 others have gone before him. A string of Canadian girls won their age groups there: eight-year-old Alexis Card from Cambridge, Ont. (2021); Nicole Gal, 15 of Oakville, Ont. (2019); Vanessa Borovilos, 11, of Toronto (2018); and 15-year-old Savannah Grewal on Mississauga, in 2017. Grewal is now a 22-year-old rookie on the LPGA Tour.
Barber has told Dee what to expect at the competition, since he attended in 2017 with his eight-year-old student Carlee Meilleur. It will be the event of the day at Augusta this Sunday, with crowds of spectators lining the holes and cheering, as it is broadcasted live on Golf Channel.
Expenses are paid for the finalists and their immediate family at Augusta with big emphasis on fun. Those competing get their own dinner reception. Contestants compete in bright coloured Drive, Chip and Putt golf shirts and hats, pumping their fists after big putts like the pros do on TV. Their photos appear on the big videoboard when they step to the tee. Winning names appear on the iconic scoreboard at the 18th green.
“I want to be noticed,” Dee says of his goals for this Sunday at Augusta. “And I want to win.”
Rachel Brady