The crowd surged toward the eighth green before the ball even stopped rolling. Cole Burris, ten years old and standing in the middle of his biggest golf moment, had just made the putt that mattered most. Not a practice round. Not a warm-up. The championship putt, on the third hole of a sudden-death playoff, at one of the most storied junior golf tournaments in the world.
Cole is a Woodstock native, a rising fifth grader at Timothy Ministry Homeschool, and the kind of kid who has been chasing something specific for a long time. He picked up his first club at age six through Georgia Golf Performance at Bridgemill Golf Club in Canton, where the coaches spotted something early. By 2024 he was their 8-10 year old player of the year. At nine, he added dedicated swing coach Chad Phillips of Summit Golf Training in Kennesaw. He plays on the JPGA All-Star team out of Towne Lake Hills Golf Club and calls Cartersville Country Club his home course, partly because he loves walkable layouts with fast greens. Speed and agility training at Fury Performance in Woodstock has helped him drive the ball over 200 yards. He weighs 72 pounds. The kid is serious.
This past June, all of that work led him to Dothan, Alabama, and the 77th Press Thornton Future Masters, where the best junior golfers in the country and the world converge each summer on Dothan Country Club. The tournament has been running since 1950. Its alumni list reads like a who's who of professional golf: Scottie Scheffler, Bubba Watson, Trevor Immelman, Harris English, Stewart Cink. Cole had been here before. He tied for 24th in the 10-Under division in 2025, went home with unfinished business, and spent a year putting in the work to come back and do something about it.
After three days of stroke play on Dothan's newly redesigned course, Cole found himself in a tie with Sean Wilding, a ten-year-old who had traveled from Thailand with his family, the farthest-traveling competitor in the entire field. What followed was only the second playoff in the history of the 10-Under division across the tournament's 77 years. Three holes of sudden death. Neither boy gave an inch.
On the par-4 eighth hole, Wilding's par putt stopped just outside the cup. Cole stood over an uphill putt with a championship on the line. "I was just thinking, I need to make this," he said afterward. "And, I did, so. And, it was uphill, and his was downhill." He rolled it in. The crowd erupted.
Watching from the scorer's table was Jake Creel, the 1996 10-Under Future Masters champion and one of only two players in history to win that division in a playoff before Cole. Nearly thirty years after his own dramatic finish on this same course, Creel had a front-row seat to history repeating itself. "It's nostalgic," he said. "That kid will remember that story. I will remember that story."
Cole dreams of playing on the PGA Tour one day and designing golf courses the way Jack Nicklaus did. He has his eye on the University of Georgia and Clemson. For now, he is ten years old, he is the Future Masters 10-Under champion, and he has a putt he will never forget.
ABOUT THE TOURNAMENT
The Press Thornton Future Masters has been held at Dothan Country Club in Dothan, Alabama, since 1950. Now in its 77th year, the tournament draws nearly 1,000 applicants annually from 37 states and 8 countries. Alumni include world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler, Masters champions Bubba Watson and Trevor Immelman, and British Open winner Ben Curtis. Winners of the prestigious 15-18 division earn a coveted blue jacket.