Kettering, OH – Any duo hoping to win the inaugural Ohio Team Championship at NCR Country Club had to be prepared to go low.

Extremely low.

We’re talking double digits under par before the tournament had even reached its final stretch. 

By the time the 36-hole four-ball stroke-play championship was finished, Austin Schoonmaker and Josh Gilkison had gone even lower, combining rounds of 64 and 62 to finish at 15-under par and claim the inaugural title.

It was the kind of leaderboard the Ohio Team Championship was built to produce: birdies in bunches, familiar names chasing one another and almost no room for a team to take its foot off the gas.

Schoonmaker and Gilkison shared the first-round lead with Sam Arnold and Michael Auterson and Mitchell Creamer and Isaak Ramsey, all three teams posting 7-under 64s on NCR South.

The setting was appropriate. NCR South is a course with a long memory, having hosted major championships and some of the most significant competitions in Ohio golf history. On this morning, though, the past was largely irrelevant. The flags were there to be attacked, and the players did exactly that.

Then came NCR North.

Only a few months removed from its reopening, the restored course provided a different kind of test. Its smaller greens and open corridors created opportunities without making the golf simple. There was room to score, but the teams that found it still had to earn every birdie.

Schoonmaker and Gilkison did.

Austin Schoonmaker tees off at the Ohio Team Championship at NCR Country Club – Danielle Stinson for the Southern Ohio PGA.

Their final-round 62 included birdies on two of the last three holes, enough to separate them from a field that had spent 36 holes refusing to give them any breathing room.

Arnold and Auterson matched their opening 64 with another 64 to finish alone in second at 14-under. Creamer and Ramsey closed with a 65 to finish tied for third with Creamer’s Kinsale coworkers Bob Sowards and Andy Montgomery. 

Daniel Sorgini and Ricky Denny finished fifth at 10-under, while every team finishing in the money was at least 5-under for the championship.

But the first Ohio Team Championship was never intended to be only about the numbers.

Presented by Maxx Turf/Tour Greens Ohio, the event was created with two purposes in mind: to showcase the depth of team golf across Ohio and to celebrate the relationship between the Southern Ohio PGA and Northern Ohio PGA Sections.

That distinction matters.

The two Sections may spend much of the year competing separately, but they share a state, a history and a responsibility to grow the game within it. The Ohio Team Championship gives that relationship a place to play out in public. Competitively, certainly, but with the kind of camaraderie that makes competition healthier and the game stronger.

The first chapter was written in birdies.

The hope is that the tradition lasts much longer.