Boys golf: St. Viator's Hill hopes to continue summer success this fall

St. Viator senior boys golfer Grayson Hill didn't mess around this summer.

To use a famous sports entertainment term, Hill stomped a mudhole in the summer tournament circuit, playing in 14 events. And he didn't just show up either. Hill won three summer titles and earned a runner-up finish in his second-to-final summer start.

Hill won the IJGA stroke play event at Countryside and tied for the title at Deerpath and Mt. Prospect Golf Club and finished tied for second at Glencoe Country Club.

"I wanted to get better," he said. "I wanted to get my scores lower and get into the 70s more consistently. I worked on my short game around the greens and worked on my putting. My lowest score was a 74 (at Countryside). I had a good summer. I played a lot of golf (his previous IJGA summer tournament high was 6 events)."

In taking current inventory, Hill said his irons are his greatest weapon. "I have some new irons that are nice," he said. "They shape the ball really nicely."

Hill is currently ranked sixth in the Illinois Junior Golf Association out of 436 players, Lions coach Jack Halpin noted.

The senior's start in the sport is traceable to some recent family lineage. His cousin, Ally Scaccia, was part of the 2013 Prospect girls team that won state. She went on to play at Bradley in Peoria where she was a multiple-time all-Missouri Valley Conference selection and a multiple-time MVC scholar-athlete honoree.

"When she was playing, it looked fun," said Hill, an Arlington Heights resident who also plays disc golf and is involved in his church's youth group. "I didn't want to play soccer anymore so I decided to give it a shot and fell in love with it. My first round I went out and shot a 150, which was not great. It took about a year to get decent enough to break 100."

Individual accomplishments aside, Hill, who would like to play in college, said there is a greater good to accomplish. Making up for lost time the pandemic swept away last fall. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, St. Viator was not able to compete in the abbreviated state series last year.

"We are going to have a solid team this year," Hill said. "We look forward to finishing what we could not last year. Hopefully, we are able to have a full season this year. Last year was pretty brutal at the end of the season when we couldn't play. The score that won the regional last year was only a 340. We were disappointed. We have something to prove this year. Charlie (Bullock) is hitting the ball a mile and David Koziol is a sophomore now and is getting really low and the other Grayson (Dossett) is also hitting the ball far. We are going to get after it, hit the ball far and figure it out from there."