During the first round of our Zone 4 Amateur championship, Dustin Franko’s very busy golf summer got an extra boost from a chip-in on the 10th hole at Kings Links by the Sea. He’d been a little scrappy to that point, he says, and was sitting at even par. Kings Links is always a challenge, he allows, but after the chip-in he ran in three more back nine birdies and headed toward round two at Capilano with a one-stroke lead.
Capilano, he says, played out in its usual way. “Beautiful course. Fairways and greens.” And indeed, with a 68 he coasted to a three shot victory over Riley Edwards who took our mid-amateur championship. Nasheel Kassam was another two strokes back to round out our team heading to provincials.
That’s where things got a little weird—and hectic—for Franko, who played for four years at the University of Hawaii (some of them with last year’s Zone 4 champion Dylan Bercan), and recently returned from a year playing in Australia. At 24 he wasn’t eligible for the Zone 4 mid-amateur crown, but he was able to play in the provincial mid-am one week later, as eligibility for that is determined by eligibility for the national mid-am tournament in August, and Franko was going to squeak into that by turning 25 a couple of days before it started. “I was definitely the youngest in the field,” he says with a laugh.
Franko tied for 12th in the provincial mid-am, then moved on to the provincial amateur, where he placed third, and the national amateur, where he finished 50th. Finally, in mid-August, his very busy run of zone, provincial and national championships came to an end with a second place finish in the Golf Canada’s Mid-Amateur, hosted this year by Seymour Golf and Country Club. At age 25 plus a couple of days, he was almost certainly the youngest in that event too.
- Jim Sutherland