Nokomis Wins First Golf State Championship.

Nokomis golf team poses with trophy after winning golf state championship.

On Oct 10, 2025 the Nokomis Golf Team won their very first state championship at Natanis Golf Course in Vassalboro, defeating the top 14 teams in the state. On that day, Nokomis’ Senior Captain SJ Welch won the individual state championship, shooting a score of 76.

In the previous season, the Nokomis Golf Team was very talented, only tying two times during the regular season and winning the rest of their matches. After all regular season matches, then came the shoot out. If you win the shootout your team automatically goes to states. That season, we came up a stroke or two short, which meant we would have to qualify at Natanis during qualifiers. Going into the qualifiers after losing the shootout, we were not worried at all, because we knew we could beat all the teams there, if we had a good round.

During qualifier day we had a good round, except SJ, who had an exceptional round. Unfortunately SJ on one hole hit the wrong ball, and ended up getting disqualified. This meant we couldn’t use his score, we ended up losing by one stroke, whereas if we could’ve used SJ’s score, we would’ve won by 10. “Obviously last year was disappointing. Getting disqualified wasn’t fun, but we used it for motivation for this year,” aid SJ. After this loss, the team focused on the following season knowing we had all the guys to win.

After our big loss, expectations were extremely high going into the 2025 season. We knew what it would take to win this year, so all summer vacation all of us got together and played golf twice a week or more. “They say short game is the hardest thing to learn within golf, and we really worked on that in the off season, because it can save you about six or seven shots per round,” said Senior Daegan Trafton.

SJ, Daegan, and Junior Caiden Chetien golfed every day over the summer. During our first two weeks of practice our head coach Matt Brown was very impressed seeing our progress form over the summer knowing we had been working on our golf game in our free time. During these two weeks of practice we played a lot of holes and fine tuned a couple of things so we would be ready for our first match.

Our first match was against Cony high school at their golf course. We knew going into this match they would be good competition. We ended up beating cony which put us off to a hot start for the new season. The following few matches went the same way which gave our team a lot of confidence. “I felt like our team had so much depth, and because of the leadership from our seniors, I knew we were going to be a really tough team,” said Coach Brown. We took that confidence and rolled it all the way through the season finishing with 10 wins for an undefeated regular season.

After beating all the teams in class B north we had a lot of confidence going into the shootout. We knew we had a very high chance of winning it but there were a couple of teams from the south that we had not played that were going to be pretty good, one being Lincoln Academy.

We ended up beating Lincoln Academy by four strokes to win the shootout. Since we won the shootout it automatically put us into states as a team. This made our team still undefeated.

Even though we had an automatic bye into states our team decided to still go down to qualifiers at Natanis golf course. It gave our team a practice round at Natanis. It didn’t matter if we came in last place because we were already going to states. During qualifiers none of us had any pressure on ourselves and we all played extremely well. We also ended up winning qualifiers by 19 strokes shooting a great score of 319. Beating all fourteen teams which continued our winning streak and kept us undefeated. After winning this we knew we could beat everybody and we just had to do it one more time on state day.

Two days later we were back at Natanis to compete in the state championship round. It was windy and cold so we knew we were going to have to really lock in to play well. We tried to think about it like it was just another day playing golf to try and keep the pressure off ourselves just like we did at qualifiers. “I was pretty confident but also it was more pressure, I’d say confidence outplays pressure in that moment,” said Caiden. It was kind of hard to do that because there were checkpoints where you gave an official your score and you could see how your team was playing and what place you were in.

This was very stressful because we were tied with another team for first place all day. After we all got back to the clubhouse it was very stressful waiting for all the teams scores to be looked at and put into the computer. As this was happening we were all watching the board waiting for all the teams official scores to be put up. It seemed like it took forever but before we knew it all the teams’ scores were up except one and that team happened to be the team we were tied with all day.

With everybody on the board we could see we had beat all the teams except them. One by one they started putting that team’s score up. It was probably the most stressful thing any of us have ever watched. We were all calculating what their scores had to be for us to beat them. The final score for the last player on their team was put up and it was two strokes higher than what they needed to beat us. At this point seeing that number we knew we had done it.

“It just felt really good to put it all together at the end and win it all together as a team,” said SJ.