Fairhope junior Trip Duke ended his golf season on a high note with a win in the Allstate Sugar Bowl Tommy Moore Memorial at TPC Louisiana this week.

It marked his third win in the last two months where Duke emerged victorious in his final two tournaments on the Southeastern Junior Golf Tour to earn the Player of the Year award for the 2022 season.

Earlier this week in New Orleans, Duke was the tournament leader after one round in the boys’ 13-18 age group where he shot a 69 to finish -3. It was only a one-stroke lead and after Duke’s second-round score of 73, Brenton Manly from Tulsa, Oklahoma registered a 72 to force a playoff.

With the title on the line, Duke won the tee flip, drove the fairway on the first hole and eventually set himself up to nail a 15-foot birdie putt to hoist the trophy.

“I knew I had a lead going into it and I started off hot, like three-under through four and then I kind of cooled off with my putter,” Duke said of his second-round thoughts in a post-match interview. “But I finished with two pars and got in a playoff and made the 15-footer.”

Although he said it was the first time playing the course, this tournament had stood out on his schedule previously.

“This feels great,” Duke said of the win. “It was my first time playing it, I had it on my schedule for a while so the preparation paid off.”

This year’s schedule also included the Southeastern Junior Golf Tour where Duke won the Peninsula Junior Classic in early November (73-73-146) before he won the SJGT tournament of Champions earlier this month (69-68-137).

Those wins helped him finish the season with 5,150 points over 7 events for a 350-point lead ahead of the runner-up, Andrew Korytoski from Catula, Georgia. Duke also added a runner-up finish at the SJGT Championship in August (74-69-143) and top-10 finishes at the Southern Junior at Saugahatchee in July (72-79-151 for T6th) and the Grand National Junior Classic in June (73 for 8th).

Duke was not the only Baldwin County athlete on the SJGT this season as he was joined by six others from the Eastern Shore in registering points in the Player of the Year race.

Baldwin County golfers’ standings in the SJGT Player of the Year rankings

1. Trip Duke – Fairhope: 5,150 points

27. Miles Miller – Fairhope: 1,725 points

52. Scotty Cooper – Point Clear: 1,032 points

T106. Blake Cornell – Daphne: 500 points

T131. Jackson Spybey – Spanish Fort: 162.50 points

T133. Eli Kinsey – Fairhope: 150 points

T139. Brody Quattlebaum – Fairhope: 116.67 points