LAGRANGE, Maine — What began two years ago as a guys’ day out among a few Milo-area friends will take on a charitable cause at three miniature golf courses around eastern Maine on Sunday.
Some 25 entrants will participate in the third annual Maine Mini-Golf Masters, a daylong event featuring 99 holes of lighthearted competition for prizes ranging from a green jacket, symbolic of the Masters golf tournament champion, to a toilet bowl for the day’s worst score.
The event also will serve as a fundraiser for 12-year-old Zak Mills, a seventh-grader at Penquis Valley Middle School who is continuing treatment for osteosarcoma, or bone cancer.
Mills, the son of Jason and Andrea Mills of Lagrange, underwent wrist surgery last spring and is undergoing occupational therapy while winding down his treatment schedule.
Jason Mills, the boys varsity basketball and soccer coach at Penquis Valley, said his son hopes to return to school by Columbus Day. The elder Mills is taking a sabbatical from coaching soccer this fall to see Zak through his treatments and will be replaced in that post by Travis Ellis.
“We knew around wintertime last year that we wanted to do this as a fundraiser,” said Trevor Lyford, a 2014 Bangor Daily News All-Maine basketball player from Lagrange and Penquis Valley High School who is interning this summer at the University of Massachusetts Medical School after completing his first year at Brown University.
“We just didn’t know what we wanted to do and what to raise the money for, but it became a no-brainer to do it for Zak and Jason. Once we decided that, we started putting things together and inviting more people and it’s kind of blown up into a pretty big thing.”
The tournament will begin in the morning with 36 holes at Pirate’s Cove in Bar Harbor, then proceed to Traditions in Holden for 27 more holes before concluding with the final 36 holes at Blackbeard’s USA in Bangor.
“We knew we’d have more people than last year, but now we definitely have to make sure there’s enough clubs and enough balls and we’re not taking time away from other families that are at those places,” Lyford said. “We don’t want to be at those places for six hours waiting and holding people up, so we’re pre-arranging with the different courses and everybody I’ve talked to has been awesome.”
Participants pay their own way at each site, as well as a $20 entry fee that goes toward helping defray the Mills’ family medical expenses.
In addition, the organizers of the event — Lyford, Ellis, Mike Weston and Tristan Strout — have created a GoFundMe account at gofundme.com/5w6ej24mu4v, where anyone is invited to make a donation.
So far, between the GoFundMe site and cash donations, Lyford estimates about $1,000 has been raised.
“We were hoping for a couple hundred bucks, and overnight we shot up to about $720 — and that was just through sharing it on Facebook,” Lyford said. “We can’t thank everybody enough, the community’s been awesome. It’s ballooned into more than we could have imagined last year.”
The idea for the Maine Mini-Golf Masters originated matter of factly.
“It was two years ago,” Lyford said, “and we were just goofing around one day and decided why don’t we go play three or four mini-golf courses in Maine. I went and bought a green jacket at Goodwill, and we said whoever wins gets it.
“Last year we had a couple of more people, and we bought a trophy to give the winner. And at that point we floated around the idea that this could be a pretty good community charity idea to do and to see if we could get donations and see where it could go from there.”
Lyford and his friends posted their tournament leaderboards on social media, leading to more interest in the event among their acquaintances.
“We were having fun with it,” Lyford said, “and a bunch of people were watching on Facebook and said we want in on this next year, so we kept track of who wanted to play and sent out a mass invitation about three weeks ago to anyone we thought might want to play.
“When they heard we were playing for Zak and that all donations were going toward the Mills family and helping them pay for his treatments, they were all in,” Lyford said.
Lyford and Jason Mills are hopeful Zak — who will resume his treatment schedule Aug. 12 — will be feeling well enough Sunday to join the mini golfers at Blackbeards.
“Hopefully that will work out,” Lyford said.
