If you’re standing on the 16th tee at Rome (New York) Country Club late on a summer evening and you see Lauren Cupp step to the first tee, don’t dawdle. She might run right up on you before you finish writing your score on the 18th green.
“Once we see the leagues are on 16 or 17, we can tee off 1 and finish by dark,” Cupp said.
Lauren and her husband, Wes, aren’t just golfers; they’re “speedgolfers.” That means they run the course carrying their clubs and play 18 holes in less than an hour – roughly the amount of time it takes “slow golfers” to play three or four holes. The Cupps can play nine holes in 20 minutes or less, not much longer than Patrick Cantlay or some of the game’s more deliberate Aimpoint-missers get past the first hole of a round.
The concept of speedgolf is pretty simple: play it fast and try to play it well. Scoring is a sum total of two results: the number of strokes taken plus the time elapsed from the first tee shot to the last hole-out. So, if you shoot 80 in 60 minutes, 20 seconds, your speedgolf score is 140.20.
Cupp, the No. 1-ranked women’s speedgolfer in the world, holds the U.S. record with a 1-under 72 in 50 minutes, 48 seconds (122.48) at Teugega Country Club – a Donald Ross design also in Rome – in the 2021 New York State Open. “This is a pretty championship golf course, so that was a pretty good day for me there,” Cupp said.
When you put all the pieces of Lauren Cupp’s life together, of course it led to this.
Lauren Steates was a three-sport athlete at Hamilton College, where she now coaches the women’s and men’s golf teams. She and Wes own and operate Rome Country Club, an operation which they inherited from Wes Cupp’s parents. They have three kids, ages 10, 7 and 3.
Put all that together and there’s not a whole lot of extra time in the day to be lollygagging for nearly five hours playing what Lauren calls “slow golf.”
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