Shaving gel and razors will be optional when the new-look Bay of Plenty golf team heads south next month to try and win back the SBS Invitational strokeplay title.
Bay's selectors yesterday confirmed an entirely new-look, new generation team for the 72-hole teams' strokeplay tournament in Invercargill.
All six players from last
year's national interprovincial flop at Paraparaumu Beach are gone - they will be in Australia and unavailable - with the selectors plumping for possibly the youngest-ever team to pull on Bay senior colours.
Three of the team - Peter Lee (Springfield), William Howard (Rotorua) and David Feeney (Tauranga) - are schoolboys, with Victor Janin (Rotorua) just out of school and now working, and Hayden Beard (Mt Maunganui) at Waikato University.
The selectors' hand was forced, with last year's Bay captain Kieran Muir now playing as a pro, and Brad Kendall, Andrew Stewart, Landyn Edwards, Sam Davis, Craig Hamilton and Ben Taylor heading across the Tasman.
Edwards will play in the Federal Amateur in Canberra while the others are with Bay coach Jay Carter at a three-day clinic at the Victoria Institute of Sport, with Kendall and Stewart staying to play in the Riversdale Cup and the Australian amateur.
Bay selection convenor Brian Jones said the SBS - 72 holes of strokeplay on March 5-6 with the best 4 of 5 rounds counting - would give a clear picture of how good the next tier of Bay golf was.
The five picked for Invercargill were the next best and deserved a shot.
"We wanted an opportunity to have a look at these guys and now we've got it."
Taylor and Omokoroa's Sean Roach weren't considered after trying and failing to qualify as professionals last month, although Jones said they weren't necessarily precluded from future Bay selection.
"We wanted to give these [new] guys experience at national level but there's no way we're counting Ben and Sean out at all. If they're playing pennants and available for the interprovincial at the end of the year then they'll be looked at."
