In their line of work, there are terms for partnerships. Four-ball comes to mind, or foursomes. But where Jason Caron and Liz Janangelo connect and gel is on a platform higher than golf.
They are in sync beyond the birdies and bogeys.
“We both know that your golf can’t define you as a person,” said Liz, who met Jason, a fellow New Englander, in 2008 and married him a few years later. “Your score can’t dictate your mindset. But I couldn’t think of a better situation.
“We’re definitely a team.”
The level to which they are teammates is inspiring, for they not only have a marriage and two beautiful daughters – Caroline, 10; Julia, 6 – but Jason and Liz embrace a love of golf by sharing a workplace beneath the roof of Mill River Club in Oyster Bay on Long Island, New York. Should eyebrows be raised when you discover that they are a married couple who share office space, understand this about Jason, 50, and Liz, 39: They long ago discovered that they were kindred spirits, in love with golf. As much as they were blessed to have a talent to play the game, they saw a bigger picture. They wanted to teach the game and share their experiences in the game with future generations.
There was a true chemistry with these New England-born golfers. It went beyond the fact that both played the game nicely or that they showed an uncanny love of the game.
It works perfectly well, thank you very much, for Jason to be the head professional at Mill River Club and for Liz to be an assistant whose focus is different than his. He oversees the day-to-day operation of the pro shop and golf activities; she runs programs for women and juniors.
“We’re just passing each other all day,” Caron said, laughing. “But we do try to have lunch to catch up.”
How Caron got directed toward Mill River Club – and the parting advice he was given by a wise sage – is a story he loves to tell. Having decided to walk away from a lengthy career as a touring professional – plenty of years honing his game on the mini-tours that paid off with two PGA Tour seasons and seven more on the Korn Ferry Tour – Caron took his first club job at Siwanoy Country Club in Bronxville, New York, where he worked for a respected pro named Grant Turner.
“He had played everywhere, and he was a great player,” Caron said. “And he was an even better club pro. In me, he saw himself.”
In other words, in Turner, Caron had a mentor who not only could teach him the job, but one who could tell him when it was time to move on.
When Mill River Club wanted to have a final interview, which was a round of golf, Turner knew it was a golden opportunity for Caron. He was ready, thought Turner, only here was one last morsel for his assistant of three years: “Bring your wife,” Turner said. “They may want to hire her, too.”
The story brings great delight to Caron because there is a second scene that speaks volumes to the man who mentored him and the woman who is his soulmate. “We both played (a round) with the golf chairman,” Caron said, “and at the end, he said, ‘What do we have to do to get her, too?’”
Neither Jason nor Liz, who at the time was on staff at The Golf Club in Purchase, New York, had ever considered such a working arrangement. But Turner and the golf chairman at Mill River had seen the same thing: There was a true chemistry with these New England-born golfers. It went beyond the fact that both played the game nicely or that they showed an uncanny love of the game.
From her vantage point, Liz (Janangelo) Caron suggests that she and her husband are on the same page in so many ways because both followed similar scripts in their quests to become successful tour professionals.
Though they grew up in different locales – Jason on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, Liz in West Hartford, Connecticut – and were born 11 years apart, they were serious junior players, successful collegians and didn’t hesitate to go the pay-for-play route. Oh, there are differences, of course, most significantly being the level of achievement.
Janangelo was a veritable winning machine at the junior/amateur level – five straight Connecticut Women’s Amateur titles, four consecutive in the State Women’s Open, eight AJGA triumphs – so accomplished, in fact, that she was recruited by Duke and became an anchor to that program’s back-to-back national championships in 2005-06.
“We’re both laid back and we both have changed our focus. When we played, we were all about our golf. Everything we’d do was for me, me, me. Now, it’s them.” – Jason Caron
Seven collegiate wins, qualifying for a U.S. Women’s Open, and making the 2004 Curtis Cup — it only proved how competitive golf was in her DNA and validated her decision to turn pro.
The results were mixed, to say the least. Janangelo enjoyed lengthy stretches of positive play on the Futures Tour but struggled to find form in two trips to the LPGA (2008, 2010). If Janangelo were of a singular mindset, it might have been disastrous, but she is well-grounded and put a firm grasp on what she wanted in life. Golf had provided so much, and she felt it had more to give that didn’t involve chasing the pro route.
“There are a lot of expenses that you don’t think about, and it added up. It was hard traveling by yourself,” Janangelo said. “I decided there’s more to life, and I wanted to use my gift.”
The gift was to teach. To instruct. To show young girls and boys how to make golf a part of their lives.
In a different way, out on his own professional journeys, Caron had learned similar lessons. So by the time he met Janangelo in 2008 – at an art museum opening in West Palm Beach, by the way – he had decided to leave the world of being a tour professional and become a club pro.
Zero regrets. That is what was evident as Caron told his story to Janangelo. He had never possessed the rich junior golf résumé that she had, and with great candor Caron offers this: “I knew what people were probably saying, that a kid from Cape Cod making it on tour, the odds were probably a gazillion-to-one. My attitude was, Well, I’m that one.”
But he impressed Janangelo with his honesty, explaining that when he looked back on his journey, “I wanted to be on the (PGA) Tour, and I did that. That was my dream. I never had a dream to win on tour.”
Walking away was easy. Sliding into the world of being a club pro under Turner’s tutelage was easy, too. As for what came easy to Liz, there was this: Feeling a kinship with Caron and being able to put her pro career aspirations in a different light.
“When I met Jason, I knew it was going to be very, very hard to have a family. (Pro golf) wasn’t what I thought it would be like,” Janangelo said.
Being with Jason is everything she could have dreamed of.
“We’re both laid back and we both have changed our focus,” Jason said. “When we played, we were all about our golf. Everything we’d do was for me, me, me. Now, it’s them.”
To have Caroline and Julia with them at Mill River during summer days when they can be part of the junior golf program is a priceless luxury. To have a membership that supports Jason and Liz as a married couple but also as individuals who bring their own attributes to the landscape is a layer of great comfort that they feel blessed to have.
Jason has twice won the Met Section’s PGA Championship, and in 2020 he was Met Section player of the year. Liz was Met Section women’s player of the year in 2021 and ’22, and just last summer she captured the Met Section Pro Championship and Met Section Women’s PGA.
Then there is the fact that each of them continues to play splendid golf in arguably the deepest and most competitive PGA chapter in the country.
Jason has twice won the Met Section’s PGA Championship, and in 2020 he was Met Section player of the year. But he will gladly take a back seat to his wife. “She hits it so good,” he said, noting that Liz Caron – as her name is inscribed on a few Met Section trophies – walked away from competitive golf for a few years while the girls were young.
But Liz’s return has mirrored her amateur and junior days: hugely successful. She was Met Section women’s player of the year in 2021 and ’22, and just last summer she captured both the Met Section Pro Championship and Met Section Women’s PGA.
A seriously well-rounded, winning team, for sure.