Stonebridge CC to host State Amateur for first time
This article appeared in the July 2025 edition of Chicago District Golfer.
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The Louis L. Emmerson Trophy
One can never be sure who will make their way to the top of the leaderboard in the Illinois State Amateur Championship. Over the years, there have been more surprise winners than favorites come through. That could be the case this year, when the 94th playing takes place at Stonebridge Country Club in Aurora.
Tested previously by the best of the LPGA and the top seniors in the Arnold Palmer era, the Tom Fazio-designed layout has been a sturdy challenge since it opened in 1989 and became more so when Mike Benkusky added 400 yards just under a decade ago.
For one thing, few of the players will have seen the course prior to the tournament. It hasn’t hosted a great deal of amateur golf.
For another, the amateur game in Illinois seems to be entering a new cycle. To be sure, some of the old stalwarts should be in the mix – Jake Erickson of Springfield is usually among those making the cut and 2021 State Am runner up Jordan Less is back to excelling on the amateur circuit as a mid-am – but new faces are a common sight these days. And those faces are getting younger and younger.
It’s not a surprise. The last post-collegiate winner of the Illinois State Am was Todd Mitchell, who was a spry 25-year-old when he captured his second straight title at Piper Glen in Springfield in 2003. In the more than two decades since, it’s been a steady parade of youthful stars, mostly college standouts, who have hugged the Louis L. Emmerson Trophy after 72 holes. Some, like Luke Guthrie and Nick Hardy, have gone on to professional success. Others, like Patrick Flavin and Mac McClear, the most recent back-to-back winner, as well as Pierce Grieve, last year’s champion, are searching for that first big break in the cash lane.
This year’s field features a typically youthful feel, but that doesn’t equal inexperience.
Consider Parker Wisdom of Bloomington, now the graduate assistant coach at Illinois State after a career playing for the Redbirds. He has three top-five finishes since 2019, including a third in 2022 and a tie for fifth last year at Atkins Golf Club in Urbana. His college teammate and fellow Bloomington native, 2023 CDGA Co-Player of the Year T.J. Barger, finished third at Atkins and second the year before at Bloomington Country Club.
There’s Grant Roscich of Glen Ellyn. He’s coming off his freshman season at North Carolina, where he averaged a score of 74.39 in 28 rounds for the Tar Heels. He’s come up big in Illinois - witness back-to-back Illinois State Junior titles in his Glenbard West years.
Another Glen Ellyn native, Owen Coniaris, the defending Illinois State Junior champion, is at the least a dark horse. A 16-year-old sophomore at Wheaton Academy who recently qualified for the U.S. Junior after making the Round of 16 last year, Coniaris has dominated IJGA play the last two years and is bidding to become the youngest state am winner.
Then there’s Tyler Greenspahn, the 2024 CDGA Amateur Championship winner from Winnetka who played at USC this season. The sports psychology major said he worries not about the strength of field.
“I usually don’t look at fields,” Greenspahn said. “I focus on my game, focus on the process. Before I took sports psychology, I had struggled a lot. I’ve started to improve in the last year or so. Most tournament play at USC is a high level of competition. I’m playing against guys who’ll be on the PGA Tour someday.“
He may be doing that at Stonebridge.
Tim Cronin has written a dozen books on golf.
Stonebridge Country Club is no stranger to high-level golf. If senior golf seems today like a passing fad, its height was nearly a generation ago, when Arnold Palmer was still competitive and a certain basketball player was early in his addiction to the game.
Palmer and Michael Jordan (pictured) teamed up for the most-attended pro-am round in the history of Chicago-area golf at Stonebridge Country Club the week of the 1993 Ameritech Senior Open. The gallery was a dozen-deep in some portions of the course as Palmer and Jordan, the latter introduced as “the world’s greatest athlete” on the first tee, made their way around in Thursday’s pro-am. The official estimate of 17,500 on hand may have been low.
That halcyon day came in the middle of the tournament’s five-year run at Stonebridge, which featured winners Mike Hill, Dale Douglass, George Archer, John Paul Cain and Hale Irwin.
The ladies also played through on three occasions just after the turn of the millennium. Annika Sorenstam won the first two playings of the Kellogg-Keebler Classic, scoring 21-under-par 195 in 2002 to tie an LPGA scoring record and win by 11 strokes, and opening with a 10-under 62 the following year (as did Rosie Jones), en route to a 17-under 199 to win by three.
A three-peat was not in the cards for Sorenstam, but not because she didn’t try. She tied for second in 2004, five strokes behind winner Karrie Webb.
—Tim Cronin