21 Jun 2020 at 14:07 | Published by: PatPenguin | Views: 6699 | News search

As you may have seen we haven’t had a lot of minigolf news to post lately in terms official tournaments or happenings. A big thank you to our few bloggers who have been helping keep the content alive during this time. Our social media has been more active as we have been sharing a lot of the #puttathome fun that has happened over the past few months.

However, since about mid-May we have seen the return to competitive putting in various parts of the world as stay-at-home and lockdown restrictions have been eased. One of the first out of the box was the Professional Putters Association (PPA) in the United States (a non-WMF affiliate). While some of the local regional events kicked off in May, the first major putting event of the US was the PPA National Invitational held the weekend of June 6-7 in Kingsport, TN. It was a large event with 65 players showing up for the pro divison and 16 players for the amateur division. With each of the States in the US having different rules around social distancing, group size and mask wearing, it will be interesting to see how future tournaments line up with summer.

New Zealand wasn’t far behind in terms of getting back to putting. As one country that managed to keep a lid on COVID-19 they were well positioned to re-open at the right time. Their putting tour relaunched the weekend of June 13-14 with Round 2 of 2020 at Enchanted Forest Mini Golf. They saw 21 players at their event as the putting returned.

The Czech Republic wasn’t far behind in their return to competitive adventure golf tournaments, with the AGHB Open 2020 taking place the weekend of June 13-14 at Adventure Golf Horní Bezděkov. This tournament saw 30 players participate across the categories, and while it was mostly folks from the Czech Republic a couple familiar Austrian names were on the leaderboard. The Czech Republic also saw a return to league play just a bit earlier as their AGHB League returned, which consists of several different types of events throughout the year. This league is limited to the AGHB club players but it’s still something running with more than a few participants.

Canada was not one to be left out of the putting conversation either over the weekend of June 13-14. At the Valleyfield mini-putt the 1st 2020 Pro-Am tournament was held, drawing in 37 players for the three round event. This is one of several pro-am tournaments that are held in Canada.

We’ve also seen events in countries such as Poland, Finland and Norway get spun up again, as well as many countries starting to discuss what future events in 2020 may look like and get their plans ready for 2021. With tournaments back on the schedule we hope to try to update our event listing as best we can with the information out there, and bring back tournament articles. If you would like to report on these for the site to give them some great international coverage, please reach out to patsheridan@minigolfnews.com

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