For the third year in a row and fourth year in five Stew Mel’s golfers won the Queen Elizabeth Coronations Schools Tournament at Royal Burgess over the weekend.

With a bye in the first round, our first two matches were against Morrisons and Old Lorettonians in the quarter finals. With comfortable wins over both teams on Sunday we moved into the semi-final to face what would turn out to be a tough match against Watsonians.

Watsonians were the last team to beat us in the competition back in 2014 so we knew it would be our biggest challenge yet.

We found ourselves all square at the completion on the first two games. One down with three holes to go, Drew McIntosh and Stuart Mclaren managed to birdie the par 5 16th to square the match. With both teams lipping out on 17, the match went down the last. Stuart found one green side bunker with his tee shot, Watsonians found the other. Drew just got his shot out to 10 feet which gave Stuart a putt for the match which he rolled in to give us a place in the final.

With what was a repeat of last years final Stew Mel faced Heriots for the trophy again, in what was a close match, 1-1 after the first two matches.

This time out playing in the third match after swapping our order (like Mr Cattanach always seems to do) Kevin Cattanach and Stuart Cochrane were all square playing 17.   After a mistake from their opponents they capitalised and went down the 18th one up.   Stuart Cochrane stood up and hit the shot of the day into the 18th green sticking his tee shot to 15 feet, to Kevin’s relief.   Heriots could not respond which left Kevin with the job of rolling the ball to gimme range and winning the match and the trophy for Stewart’s Melville.

Only one other school has won the trophy three times in a row so the team will look to go one better next year and make it four.