WOOSTER - When Kevin Smith first started golfing toward his goal of 5,200 holes this year, the first few thousand were really cool.

"I'm ready to get in as many holes as I can as quickly as I can and be done," he said.

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The 31-year-old is hoping to achieve his goal by the end of September or early October, but as the director of athletic communication at the College of Wooster, the pressure to accomplish it before the end of the year is going to increase even more.

"I'm just over 4,300 now, but with fall sports starting up it's going to be a little busy, especially in the evenings when I play," Smith said in an Aug. 9 interview. "There's not enough of a window to play before work now because the sun comes up later."

After Bruce Martin, a retired assistant COW basketball coach, asked him to golf a couple of times early in the morning this summer at Fire Ridge where Martin works part time, Smith said, he got hooked and has teed off at 6:15 or 6:30 a.m. most mornings this summer at the college's nine-hole course, L.C. Boles, where he does most of his golfing.

"So when people walk their dog or run in the morning, I wake up and take a lap or two around the golf course before coming in to work," said Smith, who can golf before the course opens at 8 a.m. because he's a member.

Seeing it like a gym membership after he started working at the university about eight years ago, Smith became a member of the course, which is $200 a year for College of Wooster staff and faculty, half the price of a yearly membership for the public.

Before then, he had only golfed a couple of times a year in high school at Parma Heights and college at Louisville for undergrad, and John Carroll for grad school, so he struggled to break a score of 50 for nine holes when he first started golfing at at L.C. Boles. Now he averages 43, and his best score has been a 38.

One of the workers at L.C. Boles, Elaine Mosier, said Smith is often golfing before they set up the hole flags for the day.

"He is the fastest golfer you'll ever see because he hits and goes, hits and goes," Mosier said. "He is pretty amazing.

"He's very efficient," Mosier added. "He lives by the second hole and has his own electric cart."

Because he lives so close to the course, has his own cart and is a member, Smith can golf there any time of the year — and he does.

"In the winter, he tells us he puts out a grass mat to tee off from, so he's even golfing in the winter time," Mosier said.

Smith has a streak of golfing at least one day a month in 68 straight months, which almost came to an end last winter.

"In 2021 when we had all that snow I only got out the last day of February when the snow finally melted," he said. "This year, I wasn't taking a chance with Wabash being good in basketball and knowing I was probably going to have a four-day trip to Wabash at the end of February if Wooster made the tournament, so I actually pulled a sled around for nine holes with my bag in the sled."

The streak kind of started as a joke during the COW football banquet on campus on an usually warm Sunday in January 2017, Smith said.

"I just happened to have my clubs in the car and it was in the mid-50s, so I was out there in a dress shirt playing nine holes," Smith said with a big smile.

While he wants to keep that streak going, having another hole goal, well ...

"I enjoy playing, but it equates to about 600 hours on the golf course for 5,200 holes," said Smith, who added that it's not even close to the record set in Hawaii of 14,625 holes in a year. "I will just play to play after this. If I get there again, it will be on accident. I'm not trying for a set number of holes again."

After going over 4,200 holes last year, Smith decided to set his 5,200-hole goal for this year.

Normally on a day off this year, he has played between 54 and 72 holes and between 36 and 45 on days he works. During the school year, he doesn't play more than 27 holes a day, most times its nine or 18. He also won't play before work between October and April because of frost.

He has played up to 100 holes a day. He did that twice in early July after getting out of a six-day COVID quarantine from the virus spreading at the College Sports Information Directors of America Convention in Las Vegas, where he was for another six days without his golf clubs.

He also didn't get to play much during the COW baseball team's post-season run this spring.

"Between conference, regionals and super regionals, it was like 17 days and 14 nights on the road during a 19-day stretch," Smith said. "I would get back to Wooster for a day, put the laundry in, do nine holes, put the laundry in the dryer, do another nine holes, then put the clothes in the suitcase. I joked that they were stay-overs in Wooster."

If nobody else is on the course, which is the case most mornings, it takes him between 35 to 40 minutes to do nine holes. Some evenings he plays by himself and some he plays in a league or with a regular group.

Because he often plays on days that have had off and on rain, Smith said he likes L.C. Boles because it dries quickly.

"And most of the time it's not super crowded so you can get around pretty efficiently," he said, "which is helpful on days we have games because I can hop on there quick and play nine holes in like 40 minutes and then get on to the game."

Considering all the golf he has played, Smith hasn't gotten any holes-in-one.

"I've been close a few times," Smith said. "One day, one is going to roll in. The joke is I will put on Twitter that one finally, accidentally rolled in the hole."

While L.C. Boles doesn't have any records of how many holes people have played in a day or a year or anything else like that, Mosier said she can't think of many golfers who golf as much as Smith, especially in one year or at the college's course.

And she doesn't think Smith is crazy for setting such a time-consuming goal.

"It's his goal and if you have a goal that's really important," she said. "I was a school teacher forever, so to me that's really cool."