'Warms Your Heart:' Edmond Golfers Help Repair Course After Hail Storm

Tuesday night's hail storm left quite a mess at Rose Creek Golf Club just days before its biggest tournament of the year.

While golf isn’t usually a team sport, it took the teamwork of members at the club to get the course ready for the tournament. “Everybody has the same goal here, which is to get this course back into playing condition,” M.J. Casiano said.

He and hundreds of other volunteers helped repair the divots on the golf course caused by the hail. “The green looks like the moon right now,” Casiano said.

The golfers who showed up to help Wednesday morning took standard golf etiquette to the next level. “It's no different than if somebody hit a ball onto the green really hard and you got to fix the divot there. The only difference is we have about 2 million of them compared to one,” Casiano said.

The club's Managing Partner, Alex Hammill, said he was blown away by the community's effort. “The hail damage here was basically like having a thousand golf balls hit the ground at one time. Seeing the community come together like that, fix every single pitch mark, is pretty incredible,” he said.

The volunteers knew there was no time to waste, since Rose Creek’s biggest tournament of the year, the Golden Rose Invitational, was set to tee off the next day. “Unless we get these repaired, we're not going to be playing any golf,” Casiano said.

The quiet focus of the sport was quickly replaced by the bustle of comradery on the green of each hole from the front 9 to the back 9. “Warms your heart. Makes you feel like people care,” Casiano said.

Thanks to the volunteer efforts, Rose Creek's green looks as good as new and the tournament will tee off tomorrow right on schedule. “We wouldn't have had this tournament if it wasn't for our incredible membership,” Hammill said.