Next to the career-best 80 from the white tees at Eagle Bend several years ago and the 111 I shot with a 1 on No. 13 at Oak Hills in Norwalk, Connecticut, 17 years ago, my most enjoyable golf experiences have come playing with Symetra Tour players.

It has been a blast teaming with such an amazing athlete every year, watching women think their way through trouble, turn such small bodies into majestic tee shots and throw darts into greens with surgical precision.

It’s also cool to witness a male ego searching for an excuse harder than he ever has for a shank into the tall grass. He watches the women’s tee shot wave to his on its way past it, and his machismo convulses and turns an honest man into an unrepentant liar.

“I felt something pop working out late last night, but I didn’t want to withdraw,” he says to nobody who believes him. “Sorry. I’m not going to be myself off the tee the next two days, but as anyone out here will tell you, I’m a grinder. I’ll get whatever I can out of this body. Did I mention I hit the gym a minimum of three days a week? Just hit it a little too hard last night.”

Grimace. And then three more grimaces belonging to the other amateurs in the foursome.

There’s one in every foursome, and he unwittingly adds to the entertainment value of the annual Northwestern Mutual Charity Pro-Am at Lawrence Country Club, scheduled for Saturday and Sunday.

A baker’s dozen of The Symetra Tour’s players partake in the event, with one added to each foursome. Surprisingly, openings for foursomes and individuals who will be placed in foursomes remain for the event that costs LCC members and non-members, males and females, a $150 participation fee.

The Symetra Tour arrives in northeast Kansas en masse early this coming week for practice rounds in advance of the Prairie Band Casino & Resort Charity Classic at Firekeeper Golf Club in Mayetta.

Jackie Stoelting of Vero Beach, Florida, ranks sixth in Symetra Tour earnings with $46,630 with two events remaining. The top 10 earn full exempt status on the LPGA tour in 2015.

The winnings at LCC won’t count in the Symetra Tour standings, so why participate?

“I played it in it last year and had a lot of fun,” Stoelting said of the event she won. She’s a mentally strong, quietly fierce competitor, which came through when she won the GolfChannel’s Big Break challenge last spring.

More than a good time drew her back to LCC.

“I thought the course was really difficult,” Stoelting said. “I want revenge on it.”

Golfers always play the course first, the field second. In her fifth and possibly final year on the Symetra Tour, Stoelting increases her mental strength by the year. This season, she said, she never pays attention to the cut line and tries not to look at the leaderboard until the final day. She has two second-place finishes this year.

Stoelting will find another difficult, enjoyable challenge waiting for her when she plays her first practice round Monday at Firekeeper. Carved out of nature without any houses in sight, Firekeeper teases the golfer into mistaking it for a wide-open course the first seven holes and then begins to tighten, eventually putting a choking grip on the amateur golfer’s neck. (Not mine, just the necks of the guys in my group.)

Here’s hoping the sweet Symetra swings have a contagious effect on all of the local golfers who play with or watch the professionals swing easy and hit hard for the next week-and-a-half, and when they head out of the state, all those take-it-back-slow-and-lunge swings that until now have littered area golf courses will be nothing but unpleasant memories.

If only it were that easy.