FITS TO A TEE

Winnetka’s mad-about-golf Banas family— parents Reb and Megan and kids Madison, Reb Jr., Blake, and Ryan—vacationed in Colorado seven years ago while their golf clubs stayed home.

That’s akin to passionate painters arriving at a studio without brushes.

Or a group of serious scuba divers entering water without oxygen tanks.

“We ended up playing golf,” a smiling Madison Banas, 26, recalls. “Dad decided on a Wednesday that we’d play golf.

“We rented clubs.”

Of course they did. The same Banas family had teed it up practically every Sunday at 2 p.m. at its home course, North Shore Country Club in Glenview, and the family’s collective withdrawal from the sport had probably neared the breaking point in the Centennial State.

“Golf is a good family activity,” adds Madison, the eldest of her parents’ foursome and a former Loyola Academy and Fairfield (Connecticut) University golfer.

It’s also at the center of her two jobs. Banas, who lives in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood, serves the Glenview-based Western Golf Association (WGA) as its manager of amateur competitions and Loyola Academy as a varsity girls’ golf co-head coach with Rick Groessl. A Communications major who minored in Sports Management and Marketing at Fairfield, she started her tenure for the WGA in 2020, after completing an internship in the organization’s communications department in 2019, and joined her alma mater’s golf program as an assistant coach four years ago.

Banas was named a Loyola Academy cohead coach in 2023.

“I love living in Chicago, working for the WGA and with Loyola golfers, and living close enough to mu family members to continue joining them for golf on Sundays,” says Banas, who competed for the Ramblers’ Illinois High School Association Class 2A state runner-up teams in 2014 and 2015 and, as an assistant coach, watched the program finish third at state in 2021. “I enjoy being busy. The WGA allows me to make a difference in women’s golf and help women develop their golf careers.

“And I look at my position at Loyola as an opportunity to give back and to practice a core Jesuit value— ‘Men and women for others.’”

Banas was super busy as a WGA manager in the spring, working with the Women’s Western Golf Association (WWGA) to organize and stage last month’s Women’s Western Junior Championship at Hinsdale Golf Club while spearheading joint WGA-WWGA preparations for this month’s 124th Women’s Western Amateur Championship (July 15-20) at Onwentsia Club in Lake Forest.

Fourteen of the world’s top 100 women amateurs, along with other entrants with a 5.4 handicap or less, will tour the renowned North Shore club that hosted the inaugural Women’s Western Amateur in 1901. Onwentsia—an early proponent of women’s sports—last served as the site of Women’s Western Amateur in 1944.

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 World War I—captured the 1924 Women’s Western Amateur Championship, one year after emerging as the medalist at the U.S. Women’s Amateur.

Author F. Scott 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.

“It will allow us to recognize, and celebrate once again, what Edith Cummings accomplished at her home club 100 years ago,” Banas says. “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.

“I’m also excited about the strength of this year’s field. It gets stronger every year.”

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.

“A big part of what we do at an event like this is to provide an elite experience for women golfers,” Banas says, adding she also manages the tournament’s indispensable volunteers. “We focus on the details because we want all of the golfers to feel special. It is so rewarding to hear golfers at our events say afterward, ‘The Western Golf Association and the Women’s Western Golf Association showed that they care about us.’ I’m proud of the relationship we have with the Women’s Western Golf Association and how far both organizations have come.”

The Western Golf Association, which administers the nonprofit Evans Scholars Foundation, also runs the PGA TOUR’s BMW Championship, the penultimate event of the FedExCup Playoffs that is scheduled for August 19-25 at Castle Pines Golf Club in Castle Rock, Colorado. It’s the oldest event on the PGA TOUR and the signature fundraising benefit for the Evan Scholars Foundation.

Fifty men will have advanced to that postseason round.

Banas is in charge of housing placement and merchandise.

“It’s a lot of work,” Banas says of her range of WGA duties. “I hadn’t expected it to be this much, but I love it. You have to be organized, which I had to be as a student-athlete in college. My years at Fairfield prepared me well.”

But the competitive fire in Banas, the golfer, is still ablaze. And not just on Sundays with her family. On September 9, she plans to head to Rockford Country Club and vie for a spot— alongside former Loyola Academy teammate Margaret Hickey, a commercial banking officer—in the 2025 U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball Championship field at Oklahoma City Golf & Country Club in Nichols Hills, Oklahoma.

“I’m more into the mental part of golf than I was when I played at Loyola,” Banas says. “I didn’t fully understand the importance of that aspect of the sport until I got to college. I’m now a big believer in the process that goes into each shot, like standing over a ball and taking no more than seven seconds to hit it. At Loyola, I was a captain and a good listener and cheerleader for my teammates. My golf game didn’t match my leadership qualities.”

Hardworking WGA manager, dedicated coach, steadfast golfer.

It’s easy to cheer for Madison Banas today.

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. Attendance and parking for the Women’s Western Amateur are free.