Local Team Advances to Topgolf Championship Final Four

Centennial’s Topgolf location has enjoyed enormous success in its first year of business.

So did the team representing it in the first annual Topgolf Tour Championship, contested November 12 and 13 at Topgolf Las Vegas.

In a pulsating atmosphere more appropriate to cosmic bowling than to competitive golf, the team of aspiring professional golfers Steven Kupcho and Braden Baer of Westminster advanced to the Final Four in the Las Vegas event.

“It was pretty rowdy, with beer being drunk and passed around,” Baer says with a laugh. “It was very cool.”

They’d punched their ticket to the championship by winning a similarly raucous August qualifier in Centennial.

In all, 16 teams representing each U.S. Topgolf facility competed in Vegas, with the Denver team as part the four-team Midwest Division. The alternate-shot format had players aiming for dartboard-like targets on the range. The players hit microchipped balls and sensors in the targets tallied the points.

In the round-robin Group Stage, Kupcho and Baer went 3-0 teams from Oklahoma City, Chicago and Kansas City. Advancing to the Knockout Stage, they defeated the Second-Seeded East team comprised of Dalton Ward and Derek Watson from Atlanta, both of whom had qualified for PGA Tour events, by a score of 140-128.

But in the semifinals, they ran into a buzzsaw from Virginia Beach. Adam Ball and Steven Allen Jenkins, both of whom had played on the Virginia Commonwealth University golf team, ran away and hid with 169 points, the highest total in the competition.

“It got to the point where we didn’t have a shot,” Baer admits. “We didn’t really put any pressure on them.”

With momentum on their side, the Virginia Beach players went on to win the $50,000 first prize, defeating the team of Texas Harper and KC Lim from San Antonio. (See the final results here.)

Having both recently turned professional after successful college golf careers—Kupcho at the University of Northern Colorado, Baer at Loyola Marymount University—the Coloradans admitted the prize money provided the incentive to enter the tournament. Between them, they’d been to Topgolf less than five times.

“I happened to be there, heard about the tournament and called Braden,” Kupcho says. “I figured I had the Nevada Open that week, so at least I’d get my airfare covered.”

Kupcho, who won the Colorado Golf Association’s Les Fowler Golfer of the Year Award in 2012, says he and Baer had “a blast. I think Topgolf is one of the greatest things to happen in golf during my lifetime.”

“It’s completely different than regular golf,” says Baer, who’s made the cut in six of his first eight pro events. “You’re not exactly hitting Pro V1s, and balls can fly out of the nets and hit the bars on the targets. And because we wanted to win, we didn’t drink either during the qualifier or in Las Vegas. But the guys who won the whole thing drank, and by the final round, one of them had to show the other what target they were hitting to. Swing lube might not be a thing with regular golf, but it certainly is with Topgolf.”

 

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