PALM COAST, Florida – If you happened to walk into the Shadow Wood Country Club pro shop in Estero, Florida in January of 2006, you probably were greeted by two assistant pros who worked together for several months, catering to its 900 members, inside the esteemed private, gated, 54-hole golf community, one of southwest Florida’s finest.
Now, 20 years later both pros have advanced their golf careers and gone on to bigger and better things. Andrew Pletz is currently the wildly-popular head pro at Estero Country Country Club, where he oversees a membership of about 400 robust golfers, at the member-owned private club that was named No. 5 in the prestigious listing of 2022 Top Ranked Clubhouses.
If you follow professional golf at all, then you’ve heard the name George McNeill in many 19th hole conversations. If you follow senior professional golf a/k/a Champions Tour, then you know all about McNeill’s fabulous success story. To say George has done well since leaving the ranks of assistant club pro is putting it mildly. Let’s call what he has done this year on the golf course “amazing.” Or as one golf pundit put it he’s “living the dream.”
After turning 50 last October and qualifying for the 2026 Champions Tour, George McNeill has had a year in senior professional golf like no other. Well, check that, there is one other 50-year old who has played better. Zack Johnson, turned 50 in March and has won 5 times and is quite capable of tying the single-season record of 7 wins set by Bruce Fleisher in 1999.
Here are the 2026 numbers to-date for George McNeill – ‘the Champions Tour newest million dollar man’:…