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Steamboat Springs — For the first time in the six-year history of the Steamboat Women's Interclub Golf League, the traveling trophy for the winning team has a new home.

The summer-long league came to an end last week, and at the post-season celebration, members of the Rollingstone Ranch Golf Club's team learned they had earned the title.

"We won it five years straight," said Ruth McClelland, of the Steamboat Golf Club. "There's a lot of pride that goes along with the title. The four clubs are all very close, so if you happen to have a bad week, it's hard to get it back."

This year, the women at the Rollingstone Ranch Golf Club knocked off the perennial Steamboat Golf Club powerhouse to claim the title and take home the trophy for low net score. For the second year in a row, the women at Haymaker Golf Course earned the trophy for the low gross score.

"We all want to win," said Barb Simms, of the Haymaker team. "But the important thing is that we get out and play in this league and meet the women from other courses. It's a great group of ladies."

The Steamboat women's league includes teams from all four Steamboat Springs courses: Steamboat Golf Club, Rollingstone Ranch Golf Club, Haymaker Golf Course and Catamount Ranch and Club. This year, each of the four courses hosted the ladies once.

"When we started this, the idea was to get all the women golfers in town together during the course of the summer," McClelland said. "It's been very successful. The league allows us to play with women from other clubs that we might not see otherwise."

The league has been fairly competitive through the years, with teams striving to earn the traveling trophy that goes with the low net score and the low-gross trophy after it was introduced a couple of years ago.

In the past, the league featured match play, with players going head-to-head throughout the summer. The teams also met at each of the courses several times during the course of the summer. But this year, league teams only played each of the courses once, and the format was shifted to stroke play. Because of the changes, the scores were tallied when the league came to an end Aug. 31 at the Steamboat Golf Club, and a winner was crowned at that time.

"This is the first time we've won it, so everybody on our team was pretty excited," said Mary Effinger, of the Rollingstone Ranch team. "The shift in format made a difference. This year, it was a little more individual, but it's always fun to play as part of a team."

Aces abound

The golf season may be winding down in the Yampa Valley, but for several area golfers the first week of September was the perfect time to hit the perfect shot.

On Aug. 31, Mary Weiss aced the No. 3 hole at the Steamboat Golf Club. Then on Sept. 2, Luke Brosterhous and Connie Loken scored back-to-back hole-in-ones on No. 12 at Haymaker. Craig Seitz capped off the week with an ace on No. 7 at Haymaker.

"It never gets old," Brosterhous said about the third hole-in-one of his career - the second on that hole.

But Brosterhous wasn't the only golfer celebrating on No.12. A few minutes later, Loken teed off with a 5-iron and watched her ball bounce on the green and then roll into the hole.

Seitz scored his ace Friday afternoon, to the delight of the four other guys he was playing with.

"They didn't congratulate me, there were no high-fives," Seitz said. "They just headed straight to the beverage cart, which just happened to be right there."

This was Seitz's second hole-in-one this year. He hit his first while on vacation in Kauai, Hawaii, celebrating his 50th birthday.

"I've been playing golf since I was a kid, so I didn't think it was ever going to happen," Seitz said. "If this keeps up, I'm going to have to fill out a credit application just to cover the bar tab."