Palo Alto, CA - Conrad Ray, Director of Men's Golf/General Manager of Stanford University Golf Course, was named the American Junior Golf Association’s 2022 Golf Executive of the Year.
Each year, the AJGA presents awards to the tournaments with the best individual hospitality, Junior-Am fundraising fournament, charitable giving, and volunteer base. Awards are also given to the events with engaged media and social media participation. Finally, the AJGA recognizes the year’s most outstanding golf professional, superintendent, and golf course executive, as well as the most game changing event, best new event, best Neuropeak Pro Preview Series tournament, best Ninja Junior All-Star Series tournament, best Invitational and overall tournament of the year. Tournament awards for the 2022 season will be presented on-site at 2023 tournaments.
This is the first tournament award recognition for Ray and Stanford University Golf Course.
Conrad Ray has been critical to ensuring an annual all-girls invitational remains on the AJGA schedule. In the last four years, Stanford has hosted five events in addition to this weeks Fortinet Girls Invitational at Stanford. They include the 2020 AJGA Girls Invitational at Stanford, 2021 and 2022 Mariah Stackhouse Girls Invitational, and 2021 and 2022 AJGA Junior All-Star at Stanford. Past champions of this event include Xin (Cindy) Kou of Whittier, California, who is a current sophomore on the University of Southern California golf team, and Leigh Chien of Irvine, California, is back this week to defend her 2022 title.
Suzie Tran of Poulsbo, Washington, and Anna Fang of San Diego, California, who won each of the Junior All-Star events are back at Stanford to compete this week in the first Fortinet Girls Invitational.
In addition to hosting five events in the past four years, Ray has secured $60,000 in sponsorship each year for the events hosted at Stanford. These sponsorship dollars have ensured the continuation of an annual all-girls event and a new junior all-star event in the Northwest.
In addition to hosting and sponsorship dollars, Ray serves as the main contact for tournament directors prior to arriving on-site. He helps to coordinate all items on-site at Stanford as well as connect AJGA staff with members of the community who donate their time and funds to the event as well.
At the Ninja Junior All-Star series event, Ray and other members of the Stanford staff coordinate a coaching clinic for the juniors in the field.
Ray currently coaches the Stanford Men's Golf Team which includes seven AJGA alumni - Michael Thorbjornsen, Karl Vilips, Sean Karl Dobson, Dean Greyserman, Alex Yang, Jake Beber-Frankel and Anton Ouyang.
The AJGA would also like to recognize the work of Golf Executives Micky Wolfe - Canebrake Club and Dan Baxter - Southpointe Golf Club for their commitment to the AJGA and junior golf in 2022.
Wolfe, General Manager and Director of Golf at Canebrake Club, serves as the tournament chairman for the AJGA Junior at Canebrake Club. Wolfe is the heartbeat of the event, helping staff secure donated housing, meals, vehicles and water for the week. Tournament proceeds from the event, which go to the Stacy Wolfe Breast Cancer Foundation, have reached over $35,000 in its two-year history.
Baxter, Vice President of Southpointe Golf Club, has served as the tournament chairman for the AJGA Junior at Southpointe for the past four years. The Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, event owes its success to Baxter. Since 2019 the Vice President of Southpointe Golf Club has helped secured complimentary hotel nights for AJGA staff, donates meals to volunteers each day of the tournament and always has the experience of everyone involved with the tournament top of mind.
The Foritnet Girls Invitational at Stanford is back at Stanford for the fourth year under a new title sponsor.
About Fortinet
Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT) makes possible a digital world that we can always trust through its mission to protect people, devices, and data everywhere. This is why the world's largest enterprises, service providers, and government organizations choose Fortinet to securely accelerate their digital journey. The Fortinet Security Fabric platform delivers broad, integrated, and automated protections across the entire digital attack surface, securing critical devices, data, applications, and connections from the data center to the cloud to the home office. Ranking #1 in the most security appliances shipped worldwide, more than 565,000 customers trust Fortinet to protect their businesses. And the Fortinet NSE Training Institute, an initiative of Fortinet's Training Advancement Agenda (TAA), provides one of the largest and broadest training programs in the industry to make cyber training and new career opportunities available to everyone. Learn more at https://www.fortinet.com , the Fortinet Blog, or FortiGuard Labs.
Fortinet joined the AJGA in 2022 as the Official Diversity & Inclusion/STEM Education Partner.