The Medway Golf team is coming off three straight trips to the state tournament; no small feat in a league as deep as the Tri-Valley League (TVL). This year, the Mustangs will try to make it four in a row with a roster that looks almost nothing like the one that got them there.

For the first time in years, Head Coach James Bruce isn’t rolling out a lineup stacked with upperclassmen. Medway graduated a strong senior class, and with no juniors currently in the mix, the Mustangs are set to field four seniors and four sophomores in an eight-player lineup. 

“This is a different year for us now,” Bruce said. “The last three years I’ve had sort of older teams, led by all the players...unless someone comes forward, we’re not going to have any juniors. It might be four seniors and then four sophomores.”

Bruce isn’t treating the shift as a step back; if anything, he’s leaning harder on the group he does have. “I have four seniors who are strong players and strong character kids, and they’re our leaders,” he said. 

Bruce’s plan is to pair each senior with a sophomore in Medway’s four twosomes, using the pairings to pass down more than just swing tips. “They’re going to show these sophomores the mannerisms and the etiquette and the way you go about your business,” he explained.

This kind of dependency on senior leadership has become the backbone of the program over Bruce’s seven years at Medway, with three of those years capped by state tournament berths in a league he doesn’t sugarcoat. “We’re in the TVL, so that means you’re playing some of the top teams in the state,” he said. 

Golf doesn’t have a ranking system like most other sports, so Medway has had to earn its way in the hard way: finishing .500 or better against a brutal schedule, three years running.

Bruce emphasized that the culture behind those runs didn’t exist when he first took over. “My first year coaching, it was too casual,” he said. “We’d leave a match we’d just lost by two shots - a heartbreaking defeat - and the kids in the back could care less. That’s not going to work moving forward.” 

What changed, in his words, was a simple standard: the players have to care more than the coach does. “I tell the team every year that, if the coach cares more than the players, this will not work. ‘You guys have to care more than me.’”

The results have shown up in more than just tournament berths. Two of Medway’s seniors from a season ago are moving on to play college golf, and the program has picked up a TVL sportsmanship award along the way, an honor Bruce takes seriously in a sport where reputations travel fast between the region’s competitive programs. 

To reinforce that standard, Bruce hands out a green jacket after every match, win or lose, and it rarely goes to the low scorer. “It usually goes to someone who struggled in the first three or four holes and then played the last five or six well,” he said. “Or it could be our eighth player having the best round of the season for them. They should be proud. They should be recognized for what they did.”

That balance of competitiveness that is not consumed by the scoreboard is something Bruce works to maintain even as the program has grown more serious. “We want to be competitive, we’re going to take it seriously,” he said. “But we don’t want to make it life or death. We want to find the middle ground.”

Bruce has also built out a genuine offseason structure for a sport that lives or dies on individual repetition. Players get a summer workout sheet in June, built around getting a club in their hands daily, whether that’s 10 minutes of putting, hitting into a net, or playing in junior tour events. 

Indoor simulator work also continues through the winter. “It’s basically up to them if they’re going to put the work in,” Bruce said. “A coach knows right away, within a minute or two of the first day, who’s done the work and who hasn’t.”

Leading this year’s group are captains Evan Goodman, a four-year varsity player who’s been in Medway’s lineup since his freshman season; Kevin Collins, whose father coaches the JV team and who Bruce describes as a steady, by-the-book presence; Brayden Komola, a 6-foot-4 athlete Bruce calls the team’s highest ceiling; and Matt Plante, who Bruce describes as one of the lineup’s most consistent scorers.