Coburn Big West
Player of Year
By Jesse Phelps

Golf is Jeff Coburn's game and he recently added a new accomplishment to his resume. Last week Coburn, who played for Nordhoff High School five years ago, was awarded Big West Conference Player of the Year honors as the number one golfer on a powerful U.C. Irvine team that heads into Western Regional competition next week.

Coburn began the year with a winning score of five under par at the Pepperdine Tournament in Saticoy. After going through what he categorized as a "down" fall season, he picked it up again in spring, saying, "I played well throughout."
Then, for the third in row, his team won its conference tournament to qualify for the Western Regionals, to take place Thursday, Friday and Saturday of next week at Washington National in Washington State.
"That's a big one," he said.

Coburn said his primary strength is accuracy on the drive and his short game. "I favor tighter, narrower golf courses that take the kind of long hitter out of play," he said, "because I don't hit it as far as some."

He also said his team benfits from strong play from its three top seniors.

"The second guy, Mike Lavery, is a really good player," Coburn said. "and Ryan Armstrong; he's also one of our better players. The three of us are all seniors so next year the team's going to be minus all three guys. So it'll be a rebuilding year for us."
But that won't be his concern. The next stop for Coburn? The pros.

"That's the goal," he said. He wants to start small and work his way into larger, more lucrative tours like the Nike. Those are "the hardest tours to get into," he said. "Instead of getting onto that, I'd like to start off smaller and build up my game. There are lots of smaller tours to get onto. It's a good place to build up your game and get ready for the PGA tour or the nationwide tour."

He said he'll aim intitially for the Gateway Tour in Arizona. "You have to pay an up-front fee, I think it's $17,000," he said. "You gotta find some sponsors, obviously, unless you're pretty wealthy. You're entered into, I think, 17 tournaments. If you win, the payout is like $25,000. If you finish in the top third, they pay out to those spots. You have to be really good a couple weeks or be consistently pretty good."

Coburn says college has been good preparation. "It's just all been a learning experience. The first year was just getting out there, qualifying to play on the team. Just playing in the tournaments and seeing how it is to play at the collegiate level," he said.

He admits that in his first year in college "it was a little intimidating going out to the touraments and seeing all these great players. I worked pretty hard through that summer and I came out and had a good year the next year. I was medalist in two tournaments in the fall and and that's when I realized I could come out here and compete."

Now he says he's looking forward to making the pro tour and like "any aspiring pro" he envisions playing on the final day against the likes of Tiger Woods. "If you don't have goals such as that, you're never going to get there," he said.

He credits local instructor Jeff Johnson at the Ojai Valley Inn & Spa for working with him throughout high school. He still works out with Johnson when he comes home from time to time.
And, he says, he appreciates the support he gets from people in town.

"Whenever I come back to play at Soule Park, like this year when I played the Ojai City, I always get a lot of support from the local guys and that's well appreciated," said Coburn.
Ojai appreciates him too. Coburn provides a wonderful example of what can be achieved through the combination of talent and a little bit of drive.

© 2003 The Ojai Valley News

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