When Fred Kern and Alex Sotir were local football coaches, they had no idea they would be business partners one day.
Their venture is Bel Air Golf, a soon-to-open driving range on Route 1 at Reckord Road, between Kingsville and Mountain Road in Harford County.
The paths of Kern and Sotir have crisscrossed over the years, first as coaches, when Sotir came from Rochester, N.Y., to be the head coach at Johns Hopkins and Kern (Poly/University of Maryland) was head coach at Calvert Hall; and most recently after the Kerns' return to the area after a 20-year absence.
"Football wasn't our only contact, because we were good friends away from it, too," Kern said of those earlier days one morning last week. "Our families used to take vacations together."
From Calvert Hall, Kern went on to coach at Maryland, Virginia Military Institute and Army before joining Ingersoll Rand and starting a machinery business career in the Midwest.
He returned in 1988 and settled in Bel Air, where he has a real fTC estate office, and began looking for a business opportunity with Sotir, the former athletic director and coach at Gilman School and now a real estate developer and general contractor.
The 14 acres of relatively flat grassy area stretch for 300 yards from a strip of 47 lighted tees. Nearby are roughed-in plots that eventually will become a chipping area, a putting green and batting cages.
The target date for opening has been pushed back more times than the owners care to remember, although the latest is "very close."
Rare birds
For one foursome, a birdie became sort of ho-hum during a recent round at The Beach Club in Berlin that also included a hole-in-one and a double eagle.
When Steve Silvestri got his ace during the round at the Eastern Shore course, no one in his group that also included Ira Gottlieb, George Ritchey and Dick Reb had a clue there would be other heroics.
Silvestri, a lawyer and Turf Valley CC member who has been playing golf seriously for the last five years, hit an 8-iron shot at the 145-yard fifth hole, the ball landing six inches behind and left of the cup, and spinning back into it.
At the next hole, a dogleg-right par-4, Reb drove into a bunker, punched out and holed a 100-yard 9-iron shot for a birdie.
Gottlieb capped the excitement on the 450-yard 17th hole as he hit a 210-yard 3-wood second shot and the ball hit the green, bounced twice and went in for a double-eagle 2.
Both the hole-in-one and the double eagle were firsts for their shotmakers. There are no records for such occurrences, although it would seem the chances of the combination would be extremely slight.
More tournaments
Two tournaments remain on the 1994 Middle Atlantic PGA calendar, a Pro-Salesman event Thursday at Kenwood Golf & CC, and the first Chapter Challenge matches, scheduled for Nov. 17-18 at The Tides Inn in Virginia.
The matches will involve 20-player teams from each of the section's three chapters, with the teams headed by each chapter president -- Larry Ringer of CC at Woodmore (North), Rick Miller of Carper's Valley (Central) and Tom Barry of Jefferson Lakeside (South).
New campers
Baltimoreans Bill Dauses and George Carter, representing Oakmont Greens GC, combined for a net 64 and won one of the two division titles in last week's Fantasy Golf regional championship at TPC-Avenel in Potomac.
The other winning team, playing out of Twin Shields GC, was Bob Rash, of Brandywine, and Tony Mileo, of Bowie, with net 60. Each team won a trip to a Fantasy Golf Camp, Nov. 17-22 in Las Vegas.