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Woburn’s Noreen Friel Mohler
comes back home to captain 2010 cup at Essex County Club It will be quite a North Shore homecoming for Woburn native Noreen Friel Mohler when she captains the 2010 USA Curtis Cup team in its battle with the Great Britain/Ireland contingent at Essex County Club in Manchester June 11-13.
“I never even thought I would be considered for the captaincy,” Mohler, 55, told North Shore Golf. “That would be honor enough. But now to be asked to captain the team when we play in my home area, well, I’m just so proud. To host the Match at Essex is icing on the cake for me.” Noreen’s family has deep North Shore roots. Mohler grew up in Woburn (her mom, Hazel, still lives in Tanner town), part of the well-known Friel golfing clan that stretched into southern New Hampshire with uncle Phil Friel’s club professional career and his 36-hole Green Meadow golf complex in Hudson. Noreen, a University of New Hampshire grad, won her first of three WGAM championships at Pine Brook in 1973. She was runner-up four times in the 1970s, among them the ’79 event at Salem won by future LPGA Tour player Sally Quinlan. She won back-to-back titles as Noreen Friel Uihlein in 1980 and 1981 at Duxbury and Charles River while playing out of New Bedford. She was married at the time to future Acushnet Golf CEO Wally Uihlein, a Haverhill native. Mohler was a member of the USA’s 1978 Curtis Cup team that triumphed at Apawamis in Rye, N.Y., 12-6. The USA will bring a 26-6-3 record into the 2010 Match. The Curtis Cup competition was first conducted in 1932 after the Curtis sisters of Essex County Club, Margaret and Harriot, had donated the Curtis Cup five years earlier “to stimulate friendly rivalry among women golfers of many lands.” Margaret won three U.S. Women Amateurs and four Massachusetts Amateurs, Harriot one national and one state title. “When I started playing, I would go to Uncle Phil’s Green Meadow courses (now run by three Friel cousins),” Noreen recalled. “But to play in WGAM events, I had to be a member at a Massachusetts club. Our neighbors were members at Andover Country Club, so I joined there as a junior member, thanks to the generosity of the owner at the time, Mr. Donahue. I became good friends with his daughter, Ruthan, a fine player.” Noreen, a semifinalist in the 1975 U.S. Women’s Amateur and a five-time participant in the U.S. Women’s Open, stepped away from the game for 20 years to run a restaurant business and raise son Brendan with her husband, Jeff Mohler, a Pennsylvania native and one-time three-handicap. She resumed competition in 2006 and showed she still had game. She reached the quarterfinals of the 2007 USGA Women’s Senior Amateur and the semifinals of the 2008 USGA Women’s Mid-Amateur. The couple owned three restaurants at one time but now are down to just one, the Marblehead Grille and Chowder House, in Easton. “Marblehead is a place we like to visit, so we named it for Marblehead,” Noreen explained. Remarkably, despite her long and eventful playing career, Mohler has never played Essex. But while watching her Curtis Cup hopefuls compete for spots this spring and summer, Noreen plans to visit the Donald Ross-designed classic course that the Curtis sisters made famous, maybe even drive by the sisters’ nearby summer home, “Sharksmouth,” an estate in Manchester-by-the-Sea. Mohler will be serving as co-chairman of the Marshals Committee for this year’s U.S. Women’s Open being held in Bethlehem, her home town the past 24 years, at Saucon Valley CC July 6-12. “It’ll be a busy golf season for me, but I’ll love everything about it,” she said. “And I can’t wait to visit Essex, see some old friends and put my best foot forward as the Curtis Cup captain.” Red Tail to host USGA women’s championship By Bob Albright When Jim Pavlik came aboard as the general manager of the then brand new Red Tail Golf Course in Devens, MA eight years ago, he made one simple, but impressive promise to his new employers.
“I told them that I saw no reason why I couldn’t get a national championship to the course,” said Pavlik. “I don’t want to sound cocky or arrogant, but that’s how much I thought of the course. I’ve had the opportunity to play a lot of Golf Digest’s Top 100 Courses and I knew Red Tail was as good or better than most of them.” It’s an opinion that Pavlik does not share alone. With 7,000-plus yards of both challenging and scenic fairways, Red Tail was named one of the top 10 new golf courses in the country by Golf Magazine in 2003, the second best public course in the state by GolfWeek in 2005, and one of the top 50 public courses by Golf World in its Readers Choice Awards for 2009. Pavlik, who runs the course along with his wife, Nancy, secured a spot on the USGA’s dance card three years ago and says there has not been a day since that he has not dedicated some portion of his day to the championship. “I’ve got a 150-page book sitting right here from the USGA and each page has something that we have to plan for and take care of,” said Pavlik. While it’s a considerable to-do list, it is not uncharted territory for Pavlik. Back in the early 80s he served as the co-chairman for the Bell Atlantic Championship at Philadelphia’s Chester Valley GC, one of the inaugural stops on the PGA senior circuit, now known as the Champions Tour. After three years of courting the USGA, Pavlik finally got Public Links chairperson Teresa Belmont out to play Red Tail. Shortly thereafter, Pavlik received an offer to host the Publinx in 2009. Other than adding an extra practice tee on the back nine and growing out the rough, Pavlik says the USGA wants to keep Red Tail just the way it is. Normally playing at 5,600 from the red tees, the championship course in June will check in at 6,259. The championship field will be made up of 156 players who belong to public clubs and who have a handicap of 18.4 or lower and who have advanced through regional qualifiers While those regional qualifiers are taking place, Pavlik is hopeful that he and Nancy can get through the rest of the extensive USGA manual. “There’s just so many things you have to get covered,” says Pavlik who has attended the last two Publinx championships at Erin Hills GC (Wisconsin) and Kearney Hill Golf Links (Kentucky). “From lining up transportation and volunteers, to finding host families for some of the players to stay with, there is a lot that goes into it.” What: U.S. Women’s Amateur Public Links Championship
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