By Jeffrey A. Rendall, Photos by Matthew Rendall
People like “bucket lists”. The notion that a person plans to do such and such before they move to the “next level” is a popular one. But what if the opportunity to do something unprecedented arrives when you’re only 
18?
Such was the chance Matthew Rendall received earlier this year when he went to school one day and unknowingly discovered that his life was about to change in a way he neither foresaw nor anticipated. Matthew was about to be given the chance to represent the United States in Australia. That’s right – that Australia, the place on the other side of the earth, the one with Koala Bears and Kangaroos and Emus, a land that’s so backwards (in some senses) that the toilet flush swirls in the opposite direction and the cars drive on the wrong side of the road. It all sounded so preposterous. But it’s true.
Rendall takes the narrative from here. “I’d never even heard of Coast to Coast when I was called into the Lafayette (high school) Athletic Director’s office and an invitation letter was waiting for me there,” Matthew fondly recalls. It was January, it was still way too cold to think about golf, and competing against Aussies was about the furthest thing from his mind about then. Matthew was in the final semester of his senior year and his future plans were more about where to go to college than they were about travelling internationally to take part in a golf competition.
Rendall was a successful high school golfer, but not a standout. “I was captain of my school team for two of the years I qualified for the state tournament and was second on the team, but golf was something fun to do when I wasn’t practicing to get better at baseball or working,” Matthew elaborated.
Coast to Coast selected players who made it to their respective state tournaments. That was apparently sufficient for Matthew to earn a chance to go “down under” and broaden his golf horizons.
“My dad got me into golf when I was pretty young – I’d say seven or eight years old. We made a lot of golf trips and I started playing regulation length courses using kids clubs and moved into a junior set when I was old enough. I never had formal lessons but Dad was able to demonstrate the basics of the golf swing and just played a lot – so I learned the rules and found I could hit the ball well,” Matthew remembers.
More recently, Rendall has followed a YouTube golfer – Wesley Bryan – and found online tips and suggestions have helped him through times he wasn’t playing well. The concept of gaining pointers from a social media account may seem foreign to the “mature” people, but it’s second nature to young folks.
As it does for every family, Matthew’s senior year flew by, the months seemingly stacked on top of one another. He worked a lot at a local golf course and made his college choice – Christopher Newport University – while finalizing the details and satisfying requirements for graduation. It was like living in a blur, so it wasn’t hard to believe that the Australia part of his summer arrived the day after Independence Day.
A number of planning conference calls later, he and his teammates were instructed to meet the group in the Dallas Fort Worth airport to fly as a team to Sydney Australia, a seventeen-hour journey. “I’d never been on a flight that was even close to being that long,” Rendall said. “The flight to Australia took off after 10 o’clock local time and flew 
into the early morning hours in Australia, so it seemed to me like it was dark the whole time in the air. Most people slept, but it’s hard for me to catch z’s on an airplane. So, I just watched a bunch of Adam Sandler and Jim Carey movies to pass the time.”
When the team finally arrived in the southern hemisphere, it was winter in Australia. The time changed, but so did the weather. Fortunately, Australia’s Gold Coast (in Brisbane in Southeastern Australia) was familiar in one way – it reminded Matthew a lot of California, where his grandparents live and he’s visited many times. It wasn’t entirely strange being there. The weather was relatively warm despite the seasons being reversed, for one thing, and the hotel was right across from a beautiful beach.
Aussie paradise, no?
After a day or two of getting acclimated to the time and location change, the Coast to Coast group began the golf practice and competition portion of the trip. “The name of the course we played was The Club at Parkwood Village (the name is supposedly about to change). It looked just like a high-end golf course clubhouse, but there was a TopGolf logo on the side of the building,” Rendall recalled.
Golf was certainly different outside of the U.S.A., but it still boiled down to whoever shoots the lowest score. But being an ‘ambassador of golf’ meant something to the young golfers, too.
The recent high school graduates thought the golf course was very attackable if it was played right, but the tight playing areas demanded accuracy on the target-oriented layout and punished wayward shots. The condition of the course wasn’t what Matthew was used to either. There apparently had been a bad cyclone in the region in the recent past, and the course managers were busy trying to bring the club back from the depths.
“The greens were in real rough shape,” Rendall remembered. “It was like putting on someone’s freshly cut backyard – and looked like the putting surfaces in Caddyshack. And there was no golf range because a local professional rugby team built their field where the range was.”
Only in Australia would a rugby team take precedence over golf. But this was a strange land, after all.
Matthew remembers that the club did offer nice short game practice areas. “The chipping green had a nice kind of steep bunker, and a pond right in front of the green. 
There were lots of ‘tee box’ type areas, too. An area from 90 yards, 120 yards, and one that ranged all the way back to 140. Instead of hitting the simulators, I was hitting full shots in the practice area for my warm-up’. The chipping green was pretty big (I’d figure 40 yards long), and had some good break in it, which was pretty nice to have.”
The dearth of long-game practice facilities wasn’t the only odd thing about the golf facilities way down south. The U.S. team found the transportation to and from the course was new – and a little scary. The transport was a small white bus towing a trailer. The driver drove on the opposite side of traffic than the Americans were conditioned to, which took some time to trust that they weren’t headed straight into oncoming traffic.
All in all, Matthew said he felt most “at home” on the golf course during his amazing excursion. “The course was very flat and walkable and did have lots of bumps and swales for variation. The greens were close to the tees, with the only lengthy walk being between the front and back nines. The challenging part was navigating all the ponds on the layout. It was good that it’s mild and temperate in Australia that time of year.”
The competing international teams were governed by USGA rules, so there weren’t any strange local restrictions or customs to adhere to. The American coaches set the rules for the competition.
“If you hit it out of play, it definitely wasn’t easy to search for the ball and find it. It also included long grass in patches and, of course, the presence of lots of water”, Matthew described. The U.S. team found that hitting into the ponds worked just the same as it does in the good ol’ US of A. Reach for another ball. And because of the nature of the design, if you hit in the wrong spot on the fairways, you were often blocked by trees going into the green.
What else? “Walking in the woods, it felt to me like there were spiders and snakes in there. It was scary going off the course,” he said. Talk about a “foreign” reputation playing tricks with your mind. The Yankee participants were told they might see wildlife while playing, but Matthew said they didn’t encounter any. So it must’ve just been visions of spiders and snakes after all.
Overall, the golf experience wasn’t quite what he expected – as far as the course itself – but they still had fun. In addition, the pace-of-play was very slow, which didn’t help to enhance the outings. If he had the opportunity to play the golf course again, Rendall said he’d look for an alternative. The fact they had to warm-up on simulators was another bothersome part of the Parkwood facility.
Matthew did enjoy the company of his Australian counterparts, however. “’Cheers, mate’… that’s how they spoke. There isn’t a huge difference in the language between us, but their 
accent was fun to hear. Think about Adam Scott or Jason Day. That’s how they sounded. The Aussie players were very cordial and welcoming as well.”
“They were good players, too. We faced a D1 golfer and all of them averaged +5. One of their players was under par for the tournament, and the guy I was paired with was just barely over par. The Aussie players were all awesome to be around and made the experience — I’d love to tee it up with them again.”
For those dying to learn how Matthew did in the tournament… let’s just say it wasn’t his best scoring performance. During one of the practice rounds, for example, he unintentionally emptied his golf ball pocket. More simply put, he ran out of golf balls. He eventually was able to “borrow” some from one of his teammates, but there was a mix-up in communications where his coach thought he had given up… the matter was clarified, but it put a damper on the mood.
The disappointment Matthew felt from his performance didn’t detract from the totality of being in Australia and getting to see things he’d never seen before as well as encountering a different culture and set of customs that weren’t familiar.
Life’s lessons are more important than placing in a single, non-official tournament, even if the purpose for going to Australia was to match his skills against players from “over there.” There may or may not be more chances for Matthew to play against golfers from another continent, but the memories he made during that seven days will stay with him always.
And it’s never a bad thing to fulfill a “bucket list” item before you even start college, right?