Wow, what a day it was.  The weather was sunny, but a little cool.  We can deal with the cool as long as the rain stayed away, which it did.  The winning group in Flight 1 was Mike Yanke, Carl Holzem, Ken Pulvermacher, and Jeff Schwalbach shooting -15.  The winning group in Flight 2 was Larry Hebbring, Larry Barbera, George Downey and Tom Horne shooting -8.  The winning group in the Women’s division was Cindy Krause, Kim Strachota, Cheri Schadeberg and Amy Johnson shooting -2.  The putting contest winner was Mike Eklund with a winning score of 26 (out of a possible 30).  The real winner though this day is the kids as all money raised goes to scholarships for high school seniors this year.

We are thankful to all the donors for our outing that helped us maximize our profits from local businesses to individual Optimists that helped us out.  See the attached sheet that details all the donors for the day.  A huge thank you to all.  If I missed someone, I apologize.  Local businesses constantly get hit with donation requests.  If you patronize any of those listed, please thank them for their support of our outing.  They really appreciate people noticing and acknowledging it.  A big thank you to the volunteers – Marcia Hebbring, Shannon Dederich, Kathy Matthiesen, Joy Fricke, Larry Podolske, Stevie Mistle Wildt, Laura Ciletti, and Clara Scheckel.  They make it easy on me as they jump in and handle everything that comes their way that day.  A special shout out to Carol Schulteis and Kristy Gruenwald who not only made the goodies for the drink cart but also maneuvered their cart around 3 courses to make sure they hit all the groups to keep them hydrated with their goodies.  A big thank you to Ed Schlumpf who came out to our event in the afternoon, just to handle the auction duties for our event.  The voice and silent auctions raised over $3000.00.  A thank you to Jon Cline for capturing the photos for our event and a thank you to Jerry Mislang for helping capture winning bidders during the voice auction.  A huge huge thank you to our committee – Greg Mattson, Tom Ciskoski, Scott Drier, John Yusko, Carol Schulties, and Joy Fricke.  It is truly a team effort to pull this off and everyone on the committee pitches in to get donated items we use in our outing.  A thank you also to all those that golfed, and those that recruited gofers for our outing.  Without the golfers, all our efforts mean nothing.  We ended up having 38 foursomes register, with 37 showing up the day of, which make this our biggest event ever.  Two final thank yous go out to Mike Lehman and the staff at Ironwood Golf course for making the day go smoothly and Chip Bunxel and Bunzel’s Meat Market for preparing very tasty food for lunch, during the golf and afterwards.  They also donated a nice auction item to us that raised $250.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for next year, please feel free to reach out to me at a meeting, via email, or on my cell phone.  We are always open to suggestions of how to make the outing better.  Mark your calendars for next year – May 15, 2024 (third Wednesday of May).  Thanks again to everyone.

photos by Jon Cline

Scholarship Golf Outing Chair: Todd Paulus

Scholarship Golf Outing Co-chair: Terry Frisk