If one were to ask Austin Burgess who he has to thank for his Handicap Index lowering from 16.0 to 4.5 over the course of the 2025 golf season, they wouldn’t hear the Eastern Washington native call his own name.
No, Austin, who has claimed golf “will always have something to teach you,” knows exactly who deserves the credit for his plummeted Handicap, which won him the Men’s Flight 1 of the 2025 Washington Lower Your Handicap Challenge.
(Click here to register for the 2026 Lower Your Handicap Challenge.)
“It’s really a thank-you to all the golfers that I have played with or against in tournaments,” Austin said. “They’re the ones that have helped push me, whether they knew it or not. They are actually the ones who have taught me this game.”
Austin, 36, has played golf to a serious extent for the past five years or so. A member at Chewelah Golf and Country Club, he lives just outside of that town, driving concrete trucks over a weekly schedule that tends to vary.
Even in commitment to that role, Austin’s dedication to golf is steadfast. While behind the wheel, he’ll listen to audiobooks that provide tips and tricks on how to improve his game. By the time he exits that vehicle, he enters another one – his own golf cart at the course, often with his wife and two children beside him.
Swinging a golf club has always been somewhat instinctive to Austin, even if he and his brothers weren’t always loyal practitioners. He grew up on a dairy farm in Chewelah and played baseball, soccer, football and wrestling, among other activities to pass the time.
“We had a little set of golf clubs out in the barn,” Austin said, noting they were not fitted or used competitively, and more for sporadic use. “You’d find a golf ball on the ground and were like, ‘Ooh, I’m gonna hit it.’”
Playing just sparingly as he reached his 30s, Austin soon met his wife-to-be, who happened to be a former softball player from a family of golfers. So, naturally, their second date was a golf match, in which Austin’s patchwork skills at the time didn’t quite hold a candle.
“She absolutely destroyed me,” he said with a laugh.
But the defeat didn’t deter him much, and soon the couple began working together to calibrate both their games a little better. That led to their membership at Chewelah, where Austin joined the men’s club, and the access he had to the course’s narrow fairways and strategy-demanding layout allowed him to really go under the hood with his swing.
As a member, Austin can go out on the course whenever it’s clear, rather than needing to book a tee time. That fits his truck driving schedule, which he claims starts at different times each day. Time spent on the course with his wife – a schoolteacher – is often during the summer months.
The fruits of Austin’s labor are visible. His Handicap Challenge Flight was comprised of 947 golfers, with the highest beginning Handicap of them all 17.0, not far from his own original mark.
Austin had taken the Challenge before, but each time, it almost served as fun background noise as he simply hoped to propel his game without concern of the competition. In winning his Flight, his viewpoint was humble.
“I don’t even win in checkers or anything like that,” he said of his usual fortunes as a competitor. “So it’s pretty cool that I won something like this.”
Just serves as extra motivation for Austin to go out and win his men’s club championship, in which he has advanced as far as the quarterfinals.
“I am still learning,” he says. “But so is everyone else.”
