The evolution of Cohen Trolio: Past Jones Cup contender shelved his basketball shoes for golf spikes as LSU freshman

When the Jones Cup rolled around in 2020, a 17-year-old Cohen Trolio wasn’t even sure he’d play. It was right in the middle of basketball season for Oak Hill Academy in West Point, Mississippi. Trolio, a shooting guard, had spent the winters immersed in basketball since the fifth grade.

“A body can get so messed up if all it does is golf from the time you’re born to 18 years old,” Trolio reasoned, citing wisdom from dad and swing coach V.J. Trolio, a teaching pro at Old Waverly Golf Club in West Point, who always encouraged his son to play other sports growing up.

Cohen, the offensive MVP for Oak Hill during his junior season, brought his basketball shoes to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, last fall just to shoot around in the gym every now and then. But high tops are mostly just a relic from a past life for Cohen, a freshman on the LSU men’s golf team.

This is the third straight year Trolio, now 19, has teed it up in what is arguably the most important men’s winter amateur tournament on the calendar. It usually feels like winter in Sea Island when the Jones Cup is played at Ocean Forest Golf Club, but a south wind greeted the field on Friday which not only felt refreshingly balmy but made many of the long holes play downwind.

Palmer Jackson led the field with a 6-under 66 in Friday’s first round, but Trolio was only five behind after a round that included three birdies on the front nine and two bogeys on the back. For the second round, Trolio was anticipating a change in wind direction and a drop in temperature.

Leaderboard: Jones Cup

Two years ago, Trolio played his way into the final group at the Jones Cup and was tied for the lead with Davis Thompson. He was still a relative unknown despite his U.S Amateur semifinal run the previous August (which he made without a World Amateur Golf Ranking number next to his name considering he didn’t even appear in those rankings). Trolio slid to a tie for sixth in the final round but still finished among a handful of U.S. Walker Cup team members and players vastly more experienced than him.

“(Thompson) broke the course record that day so there wasn’t really much catching up,” Trolio remembered of the final round, “but I learned a lot from it and we’ll see what I can apply to the place this year.”

Basketball behind him, the Jones Cup now falls squarely in the middle of the college golf season. Trolio broke for the winter with a list of needed improvements from head coach Chuck Winstead and went home to his team — which not only includes dad V.J. but also short-game coach Tim Yelverton, who teaches out of the bay right next to the senior Trolio at Old Waverly Golf Club — to put together a plan. He already likes where that’s taken him.

Last year, Trolio was third at the Terra Cotta Invitational, won the Mississippi State Amateur and finished in the top 25 at the Southern Amateur. He only played one junior golf tournament – the U.S. Junior Amateur – and finished runner-up to Nicholas Dunlap there.

The Mississippi State Amateur victory brought a spot in the PGA Tour’s Sanderson Farms Championship at the Country Club of Jackson (Mississippi). Trolio opened with 1-under 71 but missed the cut after a second-round 75. He won’t forget being with his dad and Yelverton on the range — just another pupil among Tour players like Chad Ramey, Scott Stallings, Lucas Glover and Kevin Kisner.

“It was kind of fun hanging out with that whole crew and dad kind of being a coach to us all,” he said.

The 2020 Jones Cup was the first tournament Trolio played after his semifinal run at the 2019 U.S. Amateur at Pinehurst. He remembers the noise from that week and felt lucky to have been working with sports psychologist Brett McCabe from the time he was 15 to learn how to handle it better. He also returned home grateful for a network of better players who helped him keep the accomplishment in perspective.

Back at Old Waverly, Trolio “got beat up a little bit so I came back down to where I needed to be.”

“That kind of molded me, was a part of molding my game into what it hopefully will be one day,” he said of the experience. “I’m not near what I need to be yet but we’re getting closer and closer every day.”

Everything has a purpose on Trolio’s path. High school hoops made him anything but shy despite being a freshman.

“I learned how to be a leader as the underclassmen and I kind of saw what good leadership looked like,” he said. “When I get to college golf, like it doesn’t feel weird for me to speak up when I’m a freshman when I see something.”