GHIN
We have a phrase we throw around a lot at No Laying Up, coined by Neil, that I think best explains our Roost Club Championship: As you get older, there are few things as enjoyable as meaningful but ultimately meaningless competition.
If you were an athlete in high school or college, but then watched as adult obligations, parenting, yardwork or the wear and tear on the body rob you of your opportunity to feed your competitive jones, you know exactly what I’m talking about. We can age out of who we used to be in our formative years, we can add a few pounds and lose some hair or half step, but the adrenaline rush of competition doesn’t go away. It might not be as cutthroat as it once was. I don’t imagine a golf match I was involved in could ever feel as deflating as the day my high school football team lost in the state championship game. But in some ways, adult competition can be even more rewarding.
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It’s not easy to make friends as you get older. There are schedules to coordinate, spouses and children to assimilate and political ideologies to navigate. But when we came up with the idea of Roosts — regional groups mostly consisting of Nest members from around the United States, Canada and even Europe — those are some of the walls we were trying to knock down. We wanted golfers to have an excuse to connect and hopefully form friendships while everyone tried to make birdies. Every Roost could take this as seriously, or as unseriously, as they wanted. The initial connecting thread was some familiarity with No Laying Up, but the larger mission was community.
Every year, Roosts face off regionally for a chance to compete in the Roost Club Championship, which we’ve held the last three years at Sweetens Cove. Once they get to Sweetens, the 10 teams that qualified (plus a team of NLU members, this year made up of Neil, Ben, Casey and me) compete for bragging rights and a custom YETI cooler. It is a made-up championship.
Of course, when you think about it, every championship is … a made-up championship. The Open Championship was more or less invented on the back of a napkin in a bar down the street from Prestwick and had just eight players in the field. It’s up to the people involved to determine how much they care about winning it, and whether that tradition can grow from there.
The High Cotton Club, one of our most passionate Roosts, cares a lot.
They have been creating their own merchandise since their inception, hosting big tournaments that bring players together from all over the South, raising money for charity and engaging in the kind of spirited banter that brings some color and pizazz to a made-up competition. They’ve even embraced the role of pseudo-villains in our weird little universe.
Think of them as Ric Flair in his prime.
They were not, however, able to capture the Roost Club Championship in its first two seasons despite considerable talent and big expectations.
The Electric Phactory grabbed the crown in Year 1, and Low Cal took it home in Year 2.
Our community took considerable pleasure in teasing the High Cotton crew — all in good fun, of course — that they were destined to be bridesmaids forever.
That changed this year when the squad of Connor Hendrickson, Dustin Ball, John Stewart and Lane Rockensock took home the trophy. They knocked off the RMR Rohlers in the semifinals, then beat NorCal in the championship when Rockensock rolled in a long putt on the 7th green to win his singles match.
“It was such a grind to get there, so to be able to finally get to the mountaintop was great,” Hendrickson said.
I could, in theory, write something about every Roost squad. Give me a few years and I just might. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the High Cotton guys in this week’s GHIN and Tonic because I think their story is actually indicative of how a lot of Roost members become important to each other, and what we were hoping for when we started this endeavor a few years ago.
Hendrickson was a golf professional in Tennessee, but looked to make a life change during COVID. He’d enjoyed his time in the industry, including a stint working at Sweetens, but he was thinking about going to work with his family’s cattle company. The one thing that gave him pause was how hard it would be to connect with other golfers once he wasn’t around them anymore.
“As we all get older, we kind of lose that community,” Hendrickson said. “I wanted to start something where we could find each other. If you’re not a member of a private club, it’s hard to get that match play competition that we all love. So I started the High Cotton Classic.”
Initially, it was 16 players, all vying for a cash prize over a series of matches. It was such a hit that most of the participants didn’t want to wait until the following year to have another event, so they scheduled a one-day tournament. It was there that four Refuge members revealed they’d just listened to the monthly Nest Pod, and heard about the idea of Roosts forming around the country. They asked Hendrickson to throw in an application and take on the role of captain.
Once it was approved, the High Cotton Club went from everyone being loosely connected by Facebook and text chains to an efficient operation. Members from Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama started to meet up regularly. When a massive tornado leveled a candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky and killed eight workers, the High Cotton Club felt like they suddenly had a charitable cause that they wanted to get behind. They’ve raised over $4,000 since.
“That’s when we were going to raise money for natural disaster relief,” Hendrickson said. “To be able to create that community while also helping our community and engaging in community really was the perfect culmination for us.”
Even the name High Cotton felt like it was fitting. Hendrickson chose it one day when he was driving home to visit his family’s land in South Tennessee, and the song High Cotton by Alabama happened to be on the radio.
“The line in the song ‘Looking back I didn’t know that times were lean, round our house the grass was green’ really just hit me,” Hendrickson said. “I was trying to come out of a low point in my life, and trying to look back at that and say ‘Things aren’t all that bad. Wherever we are, there are always things to be grateful for. I wanted to take that mentality onto the golf course. We can be so frustrated sometimes, and golf can suck so much, but we’re always playing golf. That’s a thing you can always find joy in, even when times get tough.”
It wasn’t long before Hendrickson, Stewart and Ball were on a text thread, chatting each day about their lives, their families, their struggles and their triumphs. They hadn’t even known each other before golf brought them together, and now they were as close as brothers.
“I think we really understood each other from the beginning,” Hendrickson said. “We all loved competition. But then it became so much more than golf. Anything we have going on in our lives, we’re texting each other, calling each other, and checking up on each other. I’m at a point in my life where I don’t have many other friends. My animals are everything to me, and my family is everything to me, but other than that, it’s really these guys in the High Cotton Club. It’s been an invaluable addition to my life.”
When Rockensock beat both Stewart and Hendrickson in match play to earn a spot on the RCC team, he fit right in on the squad. He’d earned their respect with his relentless play.
“He’s our match play killer,” Hendrickson said. “Last year, he really wanted to make this team and was disappointed when he didn’t. He made it a goal the entire year to make it. For him to be able to close it out on a day that was kind of tough for
Source: https://nolayingup.com/blog/ghin-and-tonic-vol-22-kvv