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Wally Edgell tourney scheduled

GRAFTON – A number of West Virginia Division II golf teams will be competing in a tournament this week to name one team as best in the state.

Former West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference teams will be matching up on Monday and Tuesday at the Tygart Lake Golf Course where one team will be named winner of the Wally Edgell West Virginia Division II Championship.

Until a conference divide, 13 Division II West Virginia schools and two Pennsylvania schools, Seton Hill University and University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, competed together in one conference, the WVIAC. Today, these teams are now divided into two separate conferences, the Great Midwest Athletic Conference and the Mountain East Conference. Due to the dissolve of the WVIAC, a number of these teams no longer meet in conference play.

This week’s golf tournament, the Wally Edgell West Virginia Division II Championship, is named in honor of Wally Edgell, a former Davis and Elkins College head golf coach.

Davis and Elkins College head golf coach Ed Lothes said, “Wally was the coach at D&E back in 2010 through 2012, and he was one of the most successful golf coaches at D&E, so we thought we should name the tournament after him.”

The tournament is organized to bring golf teams in the state back together once a year to determine one state winner.Lothes said that he hopes to continue the tournament for years to come in the future to give the teams a chance to meet again.

“The WVIAC was made up of all of the West Virginia teams, but it broke up into two conferences, so I had an idea to once a year try to get all of the Division II West Virginia Schools together to have a West Virginia Division II championship,” Lothes said.

Eight of the former 13 West Virginia teams in the WVIAC will be participating in the tournament including Davis and Elkins College, West Virginia State University, Bluefield State College, West Virginia Tech, Wheeling Jesuit University, Concord University, Ohio Valley University, and Fairmont State University

All participants and coaches will be wearing black ribbons in honor of Brad Westfall, a native of Grafton and former owner of Tygart Lake Golf Course in Taylor County.

Westfall was a five-time West Virginia Open golf champion with title wins in 1992, 1994, 2000, 2002 and 2003 and with runner-up finishes in 1993 and 2001, according to information provided on the West Virginia Golf Association website.

Lothes hoped to honor Westfall as he was a major part of the planning for this tournament and passed away earlier this year at the age of 52.

“There are a lot of people in this area, especially in golf, who know and admire Brad, so I wanted to make sure that we honored him with this,” Lothes said.

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