TEAM BARBADOS are teeing off in The Bahamas.
The Bajan players are set to hit the greens this morning for today’s start to the 2016 Caribbean Amateur Golf Championships at the Ocean Club course.
Barbados arrived on Paradise Island on Sunday to join golfers from nine regional territories who are contesting the region’s premier championships.
The event will be played over 72 holes from today to Friday and will feature male and female players from the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico, USVI, Turks and Caicos, hosts The Bahamas, Barbados and Cayman Islands.
The Barbados team, contesting the Hoerman Cup, is captained by national champion James Johnson and includes veterans Julian Jordan and Simon Proverbs along with newcomers Maurice Forde and juniors Iz Hustler and Xzavier Wiggins.
Barbados Golf Association president Trevor Tasker is there as team manager.
Fourteen-year-old Alyssa Inniss-Gittens and former Jamaica player Leiza Munn-Blakeley are representing the country in the women’s division for the George Teale Trophy.
It’s the first time that juniors Hustler, Wiggins and Inniss-Gittens – who all represented the island in the just concluded Caribbean Junior Championships – have been named in a senior national team.
The Hoerman Cup and the George Teale Trophy now remain as the two major components of the revamped Caribbean Amateur Golf Championships.
The mid-amateurs division (The Ramon Baez Trophy), the competition for senior men, and a new competition for women over 50 were all played as part of the Caribbean Classic Championships in Jamaica in April.
Barbados won the 2016 Ramon Baez Trophy in Montego Bay, as Johnson and Marcus Clarke teamed for the first time in the two-ball-better-ball competition to beat second-placed Jamaica by two shots and Trinidad by five shots.
The Dominican Republic are the defending champions and Barbados, who last won the Hoerman Cup at home in 2010, were fifth last year. (PR)