By Tyce Dishman
One summer day, with intentions of having fun, he and a few of his friends decided to take a ride on his golf cart.
He decided that he would ride on the back for a change. While enjoying the breeze, he wanted to play music for himself and his friends. That’s when he took his hand off the cart and took flight.
“I was just trying to play some tunes for me and my friends, and the next thing I know, I’m flying through the air,” Delta High School junior Brody Adams said.
A golf cart crash might seem like an unusual event, but a surprising number of students and teachers have a story to tell.
When Adams flew off the golf cart and landed back on the concrete, he was seeing stars. Adams said that his glasses went flying, along with his phone. This took place his freshman year in the fall.
He now believes that he had a concussion but never got it checked out by a doctor. However, Adams said that his biggest concern was his phone. He was thankful that it didn’t break.
“To this day, I still really don’t get on that golf cart. I’ve got on it one time since,” Adams said.
Another student who was in a golf cart crash was freshman Eli Overholt. He wasn’t as lucky as Adams in getting by with just a concussion.
Overholt and his friend, freshman Cole Porter, were taking off from Cole’s house and were getting ready to go on a joyride.
That’s when they left the slanted driveway, gained too much speed, and crashed into a tree.
“It was all downhill from there … literally,” Porter said.
Overholt and Porter both had some significant injuries. Overholt broke his foot, and Porter suffered a few bruised ribs.
“You’ve just got to be careful and be aware of what’s going on around you,” Overholt said.
However, a broken foot and a few bruised ribs would have been a lot better than what this senior went through. During the summer after her freshman year she was at a Fourth of July party when her friends wanted to go on a golf cart ride.
That’s when she jumped off the back of the cart while it was moving and came to a crash, landing and hitting her head.
Senior Myla Fink spent her next three days in a hospital bed, starting out at IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital in Muncie before being transferred to Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis.
“I watched fireworks from the hospital. It was not fun,” Fink said.
However, it is not just students that are getting into these crashes. Communications and journalism teacher Tim Cleland had an interesting experience as well.
He was a sports editor for The Muncie Evening Press, and his assignment was to cover the 1986 PGA Championship golf tournament held at the Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio.
Since the sports writers were covering this Grand Slam golf tournament, they were invited to play a practice round before the actual event.
He was assigned a caddie to drive him around the course. However, the caddies were younger than what Cleland expected.
“They were all 13 to 14 years old,” Cleland said. “They all knew their way around the course a lot better than all of us journalists.”
Cleland and his caddie set off for their 18 holes and all went well until near the end of the front nine. On one of the main holes of Inverness, the caddie was driving down a steep hill and decided to wiggle to the left.
That’s when a younger 23-year-old Cleland was able to leap away from the tumbling and flipping cart.
Cleland was lucky enough to walk away from that with just a few grass stains. The caddie, on the other hand, was scared to death that he was going to get into leaps of trouble.
However, that is not the only crash while on a golf course. Sophomores Sam Mosier and Jensen Boyd wrecked while at a golf outing for the wrestling team.
Like Cleland, they were trahveling down a steep hill. Sam was driving and decided to turn abruptly because they had driven over Sam’s ball, but when he turned, they flipped.
“While we were barrel rolling, I was just trying to hold on tight to what I could so I didn’t go flying,” Jensen said.
Sam and Jensen didn’t have any serious injuries besides a few cuts and scrapes. Their cart had a similar outcome, getting a bunch of dents and dings.
