TAMPA, FLORIDA | As Logan Blondell threw his fist in the air and the crowd of several hundred gave a thunderous approval for the Lakleland, Florida, resident who had just set a Gasparilla Invitational scoring record, many in attendance and across the amateur golf world had a similar question.
Why hadn’t they heard of this guy before?
There is a good answer. Blondell’s World Amateur Golf Ranking page is mostly barren, his last consistent play coming back in 2011 when he was a senior at Georgia Southern University. He competed in a few Florida State Golf Association events the past couple of years, but there were no notable finishes.
Certainly there was little to no evidence suggesting Blondell could dominate a national field of top mid-ams, going wire-to-wire with arguably the most impressive tournament golf Palma Ceia Golf & Country Club members have ever witnessed – many of them whispered as much to each other as Blondell executed nearly flawless golf across the rarely bullied Donald Ross layout, hitting 16 of 18 greens in a virtuoso performance during Saturday’s final round.
Even a few days after the tournament had ended and congratulatory messages came raining down on him, Blondell was still processing what it had all meant.
“I feel like it was a little bigger deal than I thought,” Blondell told Global Golf Post. “That’s just based off the response I’ve received and people asking me questions about what’s next, what kind of schedule I am going to play. But I’m over here probably just sticking to the same schedule I had.”
That limited schedule is part of the reason why Blondell, who just turned 33 yesterday, hasn’t made a name for himself in the mid-am scene to this point. His golf journey has been a meandering one, and Blondell has always put his family ahead of golf.
Born in the Tampa Bay area before moving to Lakeland as a young kid, Blondell grew up playing with his brother, Brett, who is five years his elder. Brett became a top player at Florida Southern and still plays now. The two actually teamed to set a tournament scoring record in a local four-ball tournament last year at their home club, Cleveland Heights Golf Course. Golf is a family affair. Not only are his mother and stepfather members, but Blondell’s three kids are learning to play alongside Brett’s son and their sister’s son.
Much of that tight-knit family atmosphere comes from his father, Keith, the man who taught him the game. Tragically, Keith died at the age of 51 in a car accident back in November of 2008. Blondell was a sophomore at Georgia Southern when it happened. He had enjoyed an outstanding freshman season as the Southern Conference freshman of the year and was remarkably able to play through the pain of his father’s passing to win two events and become the Southern Conference player of the year his sophomore season.
But it wouldn’t last. Without his dad, golf had changed.
“That sent me personally into a little bit of a tailspin,” Blondell said. “Ironically, I played some great golf that year and that next summer. But then I just lost interest and lost focus. There was a tournament we hosted each fall and I had won it my sophomore year. My junior year, I opted not to play. I really took a lot of time off. I came back when I felt like I was ready to get going again, but then my game wasn’t there.”
Blondell had gone from an emerging player in college golf to not making his team’s lineup. The Eagles were strong that year, and he had to earn his spot back after such a lengthy hiatus. His junior year, he didn’t play a single event the spring semester until a bizarre break got him back into the rotation just in time for the NCAA Regionals – Blondell’s roommate had broken the once-rigid amateur status rules and Georgia Southern’s compliance department deemed him to have declared for professional golf.
“I 100 percent want to win the U.S. Mid-Am. ... It’s a lifelong goal. I understand the odds are ridiculous that it would ever happen, but I want to give it a shot."
Logan Blondell
All of a sudden, Blondell got into the lineup. He stayed in Statesboro, Georgia, to practice instead of going back home to Lakeland, and that’s when he met his now-wife, Katie, at the pool of his apartment complex. And then there was more serendipity: Blondell tied a career low for 54 holes and finished second to Oklahoma State’s Peter Uihlein in regionals, leading the Eagles to a berth in the NCAA Championship.
“It was just a crazy series of events,” Blondell said. “And I really considered that week the week I knew I could play professionally. … Growing up, I didn’t think about being a PGA Tour player. I had played with guys like Rickie Fowler and Morgan Hoffmann, and I knew I wasn’t them, but after that junior season I realized I could play good golf, too.”
He went on to have a strong senior season, finishing with what was then the third-lowest career stroke average in school history. Blondell was also an incredibly bright student and had ample opportunities outside of golf. Back at Lakeland High School, he was president of the National Honor Society and the class valedictorian with a GPA north of 4.5. That carried into Georgia Southern as a finance major who graduated magna cum laude and was twice a Srixon Academic All-American.
He chose to give professional golf a shot. In 2013, he made it to the final stage of the Web.com Tour (now Korn Ferry Tour) Q-School but played poorly and ended up with conditional status that didn’t give him a single start the whole year. Blondell would have to chase more than a dozen Monday qualifiers on the Web.com Tour, being away from his Katie after they had just been married in the fall of 2013 prior to Q-School. He only made one Web.com Tour start in his career.
Despite feeling like he was progressing as a golfer, Blondell couldn’t gain traction. He had to make a choice. He fortunately had strong financial backing from local sponsors and potentially could have finally made it to the big leagues if he had enough time, but the struggle wasn’t worth it.
“I was playing really good golf in early 2015, but one day I just had a talk with my wife,” Blondell said. “I knew at that point it wasn’t going to help us if I just started playing better golf, because then I would only be traveling more. It was a hard decision to make, but I don’t regret it at all.”
When Blondell got out of professional golf, the next few years were wild. He initially got a job as an human resources and safety administrator at a palette processing plant. That didn’t last long.
“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, what am I doing here?’” Blondell remembers. “I have to get back into golf.”
So Blondell tried to go the club pro route. He started out at Streamsong Resort in their outside operations from August of 2015 to May of 2016 while enrolling in the PGA program in hopes of obtaining Class-A membership. The goal was to reach the upper echelon of the club pro world, working summers up north and winters down south.
But while he was applying for a job to get his foot in the door at a premier club, his wife became pregnant. It was time to move on from the game, this time in a completely different manner.
“I was making no money, it was comical,” Blondell said. “So I moved on, definitely had bouts of regretting it because golf has always been in my life. But now I still love golf as much as I ever have, but I know its place in my life.”
When you watch Blondell play golf, he appears technical and analytical. Nothing is done without intention, and every minute detail matters. Fittingly, he has transitioned his career into something similar. When he got out of golf, Blondell started as an assistant manager at a seafood company and then became an accountant for Lockheed Martin, the global security and aerospace company. Now he is a deal operations coordinator for AgAmerica Lending, overseeing the process for farm and agriculture loans.
His world revolves around his son Ryder, 5, and daughters Palmer, 2, and Reese, who was just born this past fall and is only a few months old. For that reason, competitive golf hasn’t factored too much into his life since being reinstated in 2018. He gets to play once a week while fitting in small bits of practice in between – he has hopes of playing in qualifiers for the U.S. Mid-Am and U.S. Amateur Four-Ball, but tournament golf will still be a rarity. And when he does play, he wants to feel prepared.
Blondell says the lessons learned from professional golf have taught him how to get the most out of limited play. He thinks he has the game to one day compete for other prestigious titles in the mid-am arena, and it’s hard to argue with him after his Gasparilla performance.
“I 100 percent want to win the U.S. Mid-Am,” Blondell said. “If I can get into the tournament, I hypothetically have a shot. It’s a lifelong goal. I understand the odds are ridiculous that it would ever happen, but I want to give it a shot. There were only a few people who knew who I was at Gasparilla, but I showed up and won. And if I can get to the U.S. Mid-Am, I can show up there and win, too.
“I want to play in the Crump Cup, the Coleman … that’s a lifelong dream. And who knows, maybe when I’m 50 I’ll try for the senior tour.”
He has new golf dreams now. The kind of a man with his priorities in the right order.
Top: Logan Blondell cruised to a record low score in winning the Gasparilla Invitational.
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