Michael Brayshaw with son Zavier.
Michael Brayshaw has been hard at it over the last few years with the Binalong Community Club and has been instrumental alongside the volunteers in hosting the Men’s and Ladies’ World Sand Green Championships at the end of 2024 and on the week end at the Binalong Golf Course.
Brayshaw and son Zavier decided that they wanted to do something out of the box for the Ladies’ tournament and the pink day and they got the McGrath Foundation involved as well. This gave Michael the idea to ‘paint a green pink’ and it turned out to be quite a difficult process with a number of experiments needed to find the right mix of white sand and special solution.
Michael said, “The sand and the colour all came about with the women’s tournament wanting to do pink as a lot of these tournaments do and we’ve got the McGrath Foundation on board and we floated the idea of trying to do a pink sand green.”
“For the last three or four months Zavier and I played around with different sands, dyes, oxides, paints, all sorts of stuff. We’ve got trial pots all around home.”
“In the end it was quite simple, we got a plaster sand, a little bit of white oxide and some red dye and it seemed to stand up pretty well to a few days of play. Our trial pots sits for a few weeks and seems to play alright.”
“They will go back to the regular oils I would say, but the new sand that we found could be something that is used and oiled up in the future as it’s quite a good sand and doesn’t require sift-ing or anything like that, it can be thrown down straight onto the greens.”
“The tournament was a great success. All the volunteers pulled together quite well.”
“To be able to get play underway on the Saturday after the rain under challenging circumstances is a credit to everybody involved – Golf NSW, WPGA, Binalong committee, all the volunteers. Congratulations to Chris Glover as in the end it came down to him whether we played or not and he got the greens up to play and that’s all credit to him.
“It was a resounding success. Maybe the crowds weren’t as big as the mens, but I think we’ve given Golf NSW and WPGA another good reason to bring the women’s back to Binalong again for next year.
The tussle between the two best golfers was a tight one with Korean golfer Min A Yoon shooting -11, while she was challenged by Thai golfer Cholcheva Wongras -7 who claimed second place. Third place went to Australian Abbie Teasdale who was in their playing group and finished -1 in third place.
The Binalong community should be commended for their welcoming and can do attitude as they always put on a great show for the area.
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