FAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

Caroline Smith has read The Great Gatsby five times and seen the 2013 movie version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel at least 10 times. “It’s my favorite book,” says Smith, a 2020 Barrington High School graduate and Indiana University senior-to-be who helped the Hoosiers capture the Big Ten Conference Women’s Golf Championship in the spring and qualified to compete in May at the U.S. Women’s Open Championship at the Lancaster Country Club in Pennsylvania.

“I first read it in high school.”

One hundred years ago, Onwentsia Club member and prominent amateur golfer Edith “The Fairway Flapper” Cummings—a socialite and one of the Big Four debutantes in Chicago during the Jazz Age—read the greens quite well at her home course in Lake Forest en route to capturing the 1924 Women’s Western Amateur Championship, one year after emerging as the medalist at the U.S. Women’s Amateur.

Fitzgerald based the character of Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby on none other than Cummings, the first golfer and the first female athlete to ever grace the cover of Time magazine.

Smith, an Inverness native who’s a seven-time Women’s Western Amateur participant, and 119 other elite amateurs (with a 5.4 handicap or less) in the world will vie to match Cummings’s feat at the 124th Women’s Western Amateur at Onwentsia Club July 15 to 20. The event was held at Onwentsia— an early proponent of women’s sports— in the tournament’s inaugural year, 1901, and was last staged at the renowned club by the Women’s Western Golf Association (WWGA) and Western Golf Association (WGA) in 1944.

Past Women’s Western Amateur champions include legends Patty Berg (1938) and Louise Suggs (1946, 1947) and more recent aces Stacy Lewis (2006) and Ariya Jutanugarn (2012). Former competitors have won a combined 135 major championships as professional golfers.

“I’ve heard it’s a beautiful course with an interesting history, and that the club will have a 1920s vibe during the week—that’ll be so cool,” says Smith, who’s working toward a master’s degree in sports management at IU. “I can’t wait to play a practice round there the day before it starts. The Western Amateur is one of my favorite events, with a lot of that having to do with (WWGA President) Susan Buchanan, a great person who is so good at running it and does all she can to get to know all of the golfers each year. We all truly appreciate what Susan does to create such a welcoming environment for us.

“We’re all competitive, we all want to win, but we’re also out there to have fun and root for each other.”

Nick Papadakes has been Onwentsia’s head golf professional for 10 years. A Bettendorf, Iowa, native, he knows the history of Onwentsia (known as the seven-hole Lake Forest Golf Club, from 1893- 1895) as well as he knows how best to navigate the club’s par-71 track.

“The history of golf at Onwentsia has gotten kind of lost,” he says. “At the turn of the 20th century, the hub of golf in the U.S. west of the Hudson River was right here in Lake Forest and other North Shore communities. Our course’s shape is unique, patterned similarly to a Scottish course like Muirfield’s, and it’s a course managed wonderfully by Scott Vincent, a superintendent who’s thoughtful and an absolute craftsman.

“I’m excited that we’ll get to showcase our course for extraordinarily talented women who will play for large television audiences in the future.”

The WWGA and the Glenview-based WGA, which administers the nonprofit Evans Scholars Foundation, chose the perfect year to select Onwentsia as the Women’s Western Amateur host for the fifth time since 1901.

“It will allow us to recognize, and celebrate once again, what Edith Cummings accomplished at her home club 100 years ago,” says Winnetka native Madison Banas, the WGA’s manager of amateur competitions and the girls’ varsity golf coach at her alma mater, Loyola Academy in Wilmette. “Plus, this is the 125th anniversary of the WGA. Onwentsia is a founding member of both the WGA and the WWGA. There’s so much history attached to the event this year.”

The first and second day of the Women’s Western Amateur will each include 18 holes of stroke play. After 36 holes, the field will be pared to the top 32 players for the match play portion of the championship.

As of May, the field consisted of entrants from eight countries and 26 states. Attendance and parking for the Women’s Western Amateur are free.

“We’re all super excited at Onwentsia, a club with tremendous member support and strong leadership,” Papadakes says. “And not just because we’ll get to watch highly competitive players tour our course. The event will also enable us to show that Onwentsia is more than a private club.

“It’s also a major part of our community.”

Onwentsia Club is located at 300 North Green Bay Road in Lake Forest. For more information about the Women’s Western Amateur, visit womenswesternamateur.com.