It was truly refreshing to have long sustained social contact with a plethora of great people throughout a long day Tuesday at Mingo Bottom Golf Club.

The third annual state invitational for girls appeared to be a success on nearly all accounts.

Of course, the only negative was a natural social-distancing sport like golf having eight young ladies unable to compete.

That’s because in Kanawha County where they attend school the state metrics and their specific color coding wasn’t green or yellow so they weren’t eligible to compete.

At least the girls, hopefully if things work out and Kanawha County can avoid orange or red status in the future, are supposed to get the chance to return to Elizabeth and play.

Overall, albeit what seemed to be an endless combination of some varying degree of muggy, pretty warm and soggy, it turned out to be a great day on the links.

I’ve been talking with one of my old college buddies rather often as of late.

We discuss all kinds of stuff, most of which is probably best left off social media.

Along those same lines, I had some more than entertaining conversations with a couple of moms during the afternoon.

Suffice it to say the kind of back and forth talks we had were things which probably should be on a television program.

I’m not so sure it was much of a debate, really.

Those types of things never would be openly discussed on the airways.

It was more along the lines of vast current real life situations and experiences on a wide variety of issues which we were in complete agreement with.

The most interesting part was when one of them told me in essence it’s nearly impossible to have this sort of dialogue with people because they will think you’re crazy.

I just smiled.

Speaking of smiling, although I only talked to him on the phone there’s no question in my mind Warren Root is grinning from ear to ear.

Root, who is the director of golf at Greenhills Country Club in Ravenswood, has been getting everything together for his Ascend Performance Flow State Junior Academy.

“It’s actually our debut piece of the open house,” admitted Root, who is inviting everyone to the golf course for the event which will take place from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m. next Saturday.

“We are setting up everything we are going to do. We’ll have all the DiscoverGolf stuff out, the Mach 3 speed training out, our fitting card and the launch monitor.”

When asked how high his excitement level actually was he said “oh, man, big-time. It’s taken awhile to get here, but now we’re here I’m ready to roll. We’re trying to get some local vendors to come down.

“I have seven ambassadors who are already in the program and in the academy already. Alex Easthom is one, the defending West Virginia amateur champ. They’ll be there doing their thing, show what all is coming up and how the games work.”

Root said the best way for the public to stay informed and get more information is to follow Greenhills Country Club on Facebook or Instagram.

Contact Jay Bennett at jbennett@newsandsentinel.com