If you’re standing on the 16th tee at Rome (New York) Country Club late on a summer evening and you see Lauren Cupp step to the first tee, don’t dawdle. She might run right up on you before you finish writing your score on the 18th green.
“Once we see the leagues are on 16 or 17, we can tee off 1 and finish by dark,” Cupp said.
Lauren and her husband, Wes, aren’t just golfers; they’re “speedgolfers.” That means they run the course carrying their clubs and play 18 holes in less than an hour – roughly the amount of time it takes “slow golfers” to play three or four holes. The Cupps can play nine holes in 20 minutes or less, not much longer than Patrick Cantlay or some of the game’s more deliberate Aimpoint-missers get past the first hole of a round.
The concept of speedgolf is pretty simple: play it fast and try to play it well. Scoring is a sum total of two results: the number of strokes taken plus the time elapsed from the first tee shot to the last hole-out. So, if you shoot 80 in 60 minutes, 20 seconds, your speedgolf score is 140.20.
Cupp, the No. 1-ranked women’s speedgolfer in the world, holds the U.S. record with a 1-under 72 in 50 minutes, 48 seconds (122.48) at Teugega Country Club – a Donald Ross design also in Rome – in the 2021 New York State Open. “This is a pretty championship golf course, so that was a pretty good day for me there,” Cupp said.
When you put all the pieces of Lauren Cupp’s life together, of course it led to this.
Lauren Steates was a three-sport athlete at Hamilton College, where she now coaches the women’s and men’s golf teams. She and Wes own and operate Rome Country Club, an operation which they inherited from Wes Cupp’s parents. They have three kids, ages 10, 7 and 3.
“I’d push the baby in the stroller and kind of jog in between shots … get the walk and the golf in. And then I stumbled upon speedgolf, and once I found out it was a real sport, I was hooked.” — Lauren Cupp
Put all that together and there’s not a whole lot of extra time in the day to be lollygagging for nearly five hours playing what Lauren calls “slow golf.”
“It’s a good kind of crazy,” Cupp, 39, said of her packed life as mother, coach and athlete. “They all kind of complement each other, which is nice. … [Speedgolf] put together two disciplines that I’m pretty comfortable with.
“I mean, having a family really is what drew me to speedgolf. I still wanted to play competitively, but as you know, finding five hours to practice is no more once you have a family, which comes with the territory. But I just kind of started getting my practicing in quickly. I’d push the baby in the stroller and kind of jog in between shots … get the walk and the golf in. And then I stumbled upon speedgolf, and once I found out it was a real sport, I was hooked.”
Speedgolf wasn’t necessarily love at first try. Knowing the Cupps’ all-around athleticism, a club member mentioned the concept of it to them. After googling a clip from ESPN, Lauren and Wes decided to try nine holes.
“It was hard. It was miserable. We hated it,” she said. “And then we signed up for a tournament in Richmond, Virginia, and the rest is kind of history. It’s a little bit of an acquired-taste type thing for the regular golfer.”
Cupp – the top-ranked women’s speedgolfer in the world since 2018 – now plays speedgolf pretty much every day.
“Even if it’s nine holes in 20 minutes, I mean, I can find 20 minutes,” she said. “So I try to play most days in the summertime. In the wintertime, you do have to kind of train in both disciplines. So I’ll run and hit golf balls, but it’s not quite as effective. I mean, the best way to get better at speedgolf is to just play speedgolf. Because it is a bit of an acquired taste but also a learned skill to balance the time, the heartbeat while still hitting good golf shots.”
Cupp and her husband compete in about a half dozen speedgolf events a year on the Speedgolf USA Tour Series and internationally, often traveling as far as New Zealand, Japan and Europe for competitions. She’ll compete in the Irish Speedgolf Open at Castlebar in County Mayo next week and the World Championships, which are held every other year, November 14-15 in Japan at the Seven Hundred Club.
“Speedgolf gives me the opportunity to travel and meet a lot of cool people,” said Cupp, who won world championships in 2018 and 2021 and last year won the British Speedgolf Championship by shooting a 68 in a time of 40 minutes, five seconds (108.05) at Sunningdale Heath Golf Club.
“In other parts of the world, it’s much more widespread than it is here,” she added, noting that in Japan it’s “huge,” with national television and fans who know all the players.
The Cupps played host to June’s U.S. Speedgolf Open at Rome Country Club and upped the ante by making it a 54-hole event – an evening first round on day one and then 36 holes, in the morning and evening, on day two.
“That was a big undertaking, and it was the first of its kind in that it was a 54-hole event in a very short time period of about 20 hours,” she said. “It was a lot of golf, and we were tired out.”
Cupp gets some recognition for her excellence. She and her husband participated in a reality show in South Korea “which was a riot,” and she’s been featured on CBS Saturday Morning with Dana Jacobson and the Today show with Harry Smith.
But while her speedgolf prowess gets attention, Cupp maintains her primary focus on parenting and coaching.
Cupp (née Steates) competed in track and field (primarily jumps) and volleyball at Hamilton College. Because the school didn’t have a golf program, she started it as a club sport.
After graduating in 2007, her master plan was to follow in her parents’ footsteps as a lawyer. But one summer working in their firm before applying to law school convinced her that that life wasn’t for her, so she got a master’s in education and went into teaching and did a little coaching as well.
When Hamilton decided to make women’s golf a varsity program in 2012, it called in Cupp to help get it off the ground.
“It was like a clinic at the start,” she said of the inaugural women’s team. “We had a couple girls that could definitely play and a couple of girls that we were trying to get to finish 18 holes, including my sister [Katie], who I roped into playing because I needed a fifth.”
In 2017, Cupp was named the head coach for Hamilton’s men’s and women’s teams. She’s done pretty well with it, earning women’s (2021) and men’s (2022) coach-of-the-year honors in the New England Small College Athletic Association. Her men’s team qualified for the NCAA Division III Championship in 2022, and one of her women’s players reached the NCAAs in 2023.
“We were ranked as high as sixth in the country last fall, so it’s come a long way in a fairly short period of time,” she said of the Hamilton women’s program. “The men’s team has had some good success the last few years – a league championship and first NCAA appearance in over 20 years a couple of years ago. Runner-up in the league this year and got one of the best players in the country, an all-American from Spain: Ramon Aroca from Madrid. He’s next-level good.”
Cupp doesn’t inflict her speedgolf passion on her college teams, though it does crop up occasionally in their compact season.
“If it’s cold out, we’ll do some jogging to the golf ball to get warm,” she said. “I did have one player who was actually a triathlete who came to the New York State Open last summer, played, competed and won the amateur division doing it for the first time.”
Cupp’s still pretty good at “slow golf” herself, winning the New York State Women’s Mid-Amateur in 2017 and finishing runner-up multiple times including last week. She qualified for the 2016 U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur and made the cut for match play. She’s also won the Rome City Amateur 10 times and the Greater Utica City Amateur 14 more.
“I do think my game has really benefited from playing quickly and with fewer clubs,” she said. “It certainly takes a lot of the thinking out of it and makes it a little more reactive. But it also makes you think a little bit more creatively because you only have four or five clubs in your bag.”
“It’s never going to be a leisurely kind of sport. But I do think it’d be a perfect Olympic sport. Maybe by the time my kids get older, it’ll be in the Olympics. That would be cool.” — Lauren Cupp
As you might expect, Cupp isn’t particularly tolerant of slow play.
“It’s like the two are different disciplines,” she said of speed vs. normal golf. “I still can really appreciate playing a regular round of golf with my full set of clubs. I can play and appreciate that, but I do hate slow play, and I think everybody hates slow play. Does anybody really like to play a six-hour round? All that pre-shot routine and overthinking is not necessary to golf.”
Cupp has posted a few sub-70 speedgolf rounds. Her best time on a traditional course is 46 minutes, but she’s typically in the 50- to 55-minute range in normal conditions – roughly running just under eight-minute miles carrying clubs between the shots over about five miles … if you hit it straight.
“I take more time than others with my shot,” Cupp said. “I’m a little bit more of a golfer than a runner, and that’s where I make up shots is on trying to shoot golf scores around par. If you’ve got a 3-footer and you rush and miss it, I mean, it’s essentially a minute which is so hard to make up running. At least for my strategy, I do take a few deep breaths, stand over the ball a second, line it up and then swing.”
Owning their own public golf club makes it easy to implement daily speedgolf windows at the beginning and end of days. Cupp helps advocate for other facilities to accommodate speedgolfers.
“What speedgolf-friendly courses will do is block off the first 20 minutes of the day, not even taking up the first tee time,” she said. “If the first tee time is at 7 o’clock, they block off 6:40 to 7 a.m. and no one even has to show up any earlier to work the pro shop. People will just go off in onesomes, and you can get out a decent number of players just within 20 minutes. That’s the easiest way. It doesn’t cost you any more, and you can get out a lot of players in a very short amount of time. By the time you get to your first tee time at 7 o’clock, no one even knows you were there.”
As the sport slowly grows, so too does its ambition. While it likely won’t happen for Cupp in her competitive lifetime, the next big step for speedgolf is applying to get included on the Olympics program in future games. Cupp believes it could be a more natural fit for the Olympics than slow golf.
“I don’t think it’s ever going to be a mainstream sport; it’s always going to be niche,” she said. “It’s hard, you know; running a golf course is hard. So it’s never going to be a leisurely kind of sport. But I do think it’d be a perfect Olympic sport. It really mirrors biathlon a lot. You’ve got that heart rate up, but it’s that balance, especially with the short game and the putting, of getting your heart rate down to take a good shot. It’s kind of like biathlon that way. Maybe by the time my kids get older, it’ll be in the Olympics. That would be cool.”