On a balmy, breezy spring evening, DRS and TABC competed in the first-ever Yeshiva League golf match at Seawane Golf Club in Hewlett, NY. This past Monday, TABC students Yosef Shell, Bentzion Keiser, Yitz Goldstein, Dovid Saks, Aryeh Simon and Joshua Posner and DRS students Jack Greenbaum, Mikey Freund, Shua Fogel, Ami Marks, Josh Papilsky and Shlomo Ratner put their golf skills to the test, actualizing a long-held Yeshiva League dream.
Joshua Posner, a TABC freshman and avid golfer, joined the golf team hoping to help it grow. His father, Daniel, encouraged the team to hone their skills by facilitating the installation of simulators, the distribution of golf bags and polos, and even finding the team a coach, boosting the team’s status to an official TABC sports team. This was a huge milestone in the Yeshiva League—in the fall of 2024, TABC was the first school in the Yeshiva League to install a golf simulator. Word of TABC’s golf success spread quickly; across the river in Woodmere, Eli Freund, father of DRS golf captain Mikey Freund, also had a goal of growing the DRS golf team. Posner and Freund began discussing plans for a match between the two new-and-improved teams. Both teams reached out to different schools in the area, and upon discovering their shared experiences, a match was born, due to “a bunch of hard work from Daniel Posner and Eli Freund, Oren Glickman (TABC’s athletic director), TABC coach Jake Rothenberg, and DRS coaches Ari Leifer and Sammy Glogower,” according to TABC golfer Yosef Shell. Freund, a benefactor of DRS’s golf team, is also a member of the Seawane Golf Club and offered to host the game on the Seawane green. DRS Rabbi Shmuel Drebin was instrumental in championing the event at the administrative level, securing school approval, and helping bring the tournament to life.
The teams were split up into groups, with each group comprised of two TABC players and two DRS players. Before the game at 5 pm, the golfers practiced putting and walked the course to get a feel for the environment of the game. Each group was assigned a caddy from the Seawane Golf Club who knew the course well. At the end of the nine-hole game, DRS secured the win with a three-point lead. The course was lined with scoreboards at each hole to mimic a professional golf game. After the game, the players, coaches, and caddies enjoyed a dinner of leftovers from an NCSY event that took place at Seawane earlier in the day alongside a trophy ceremony to celebrate the winning team and MVP Mikey Freund. Rabbi Drebin, who was instrumental in the advent of the game, presented the trophies.
Despite TABC’s narrow loss, Shell described the day as “everyone coming together and wanting to have a great day, a great matchup…really something special.” The game was filmed by a camera crew to mark the monumental event, and a documentary-style highlight reel is in the works. This game marks the first of many—for example, TABC and Kushner will be competing at Overpeck on Friday—and will hopefully forge a legacy for generations to come.
Eliana Birman is the assistant digital editor for The Jewish Link. She is a rising sophomore at Barnard College and lives in Teaneck.
