Making the Rounds: Wayne Parsell, 94, was impactful tournament chairman at Ancil Hoffman

Tournament chairman.

The title sounds impressive, but it’s a thankless job in which headaches inevitably outweigh highlights and complaints trump compliments.

Wayne Parsell ran the midweek show at Ancil Hoffman for a dozen years. He performed the volunteer task so long and so admirably that the course’s board of directors named a tournament in his honor.

The annual Wayne Parsell Senior Net Championship was most recently held Nov. 20. Parsell, who struck the honorary first ball, died last week at age 94.

“He was No. 1 on my automatic dial,” said Alan Reed, who succeeded Parsell as Ancil’s midweek tournament chairman in 2000. “He was keen to make sure we kept things going.”

Ancil’s members were understandably skeptical that anyone could live up to Parsell’s high standard, Reed said. After all, in an era in which almost everything – pairings, scoring and scorecards – was done by hand, Parsell was a master of detail.

“It was a huge undertaking,” Reed said. “He gave a lot of his time.”

For your viewing pleasure

The U.S. Senior Open (June 25-28) at Del Paso tops the local tournament calendar for 2015. But there will be more regional opportunities than usual to watch the best in the game this year. The others, in order:

▪ Feb. 12-15: PGA Tour Pebble Beach National Pro-Am

▪ April 23-26: Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic at Lake Merced in Daly City

▪ April 29-May 3: World Golf Championship Match Play at Harding Park in San Francisco

▪ May 2-6: United States Golf Association Four-Ball Amateur at Olympic Club in San Francisco

▪ May 23-25: Memorial Amateur at Ancil Hoffman

▪ July 17-19: American Century Celebrity Golf Championship at Edgewood Tahoe

▪ Aug. 6-9: PGA Tour Barracuda Championship at Montreux in Reno

▪ Sept. 5-7: California State Amateur at Haggin Oaks

Et cetera

▪ UC Davis assistant men’s golf coach Tom Johnson qualified for this week’s PGA Tour Sony Open in Honolulu. Johnson, a former PGA Tour member, earned one of four spots among 77 players attempting to qualify. Sacramento’s Spencer Levin also is in the field.

▪ Natalie Gulbis (Granite Bay High School) has Category 1 status – the highest version of full status – for the 2015 LPGA Tour season despite finishing 138th on the 2014 money list with earnings of $20,447. She received a medical exemption after a hip injury limited her to 12 starts last year.

▪ Gold River’s John Catlin made it through the first stage of Asian Tour qualifying in Hua Hin, Thailand. The final stage is later this month.

▪ The Almond Blossom net best-ball tournament is Feb. 21-22 at Arbuckle. Call (530) 476-2470 for details.

This story was originally published January 13, 2015 at 6:07 PM with the headline "Making the Rounds: Wayne Parsell, 94, was impactful tournament chairman at Ancil Hoffman."