Jackets open NCAA golf regional Thursday

It’s a beautiful house in a beautiful neighborhood.

Tan. Stucco. Three stories. A lob wedge away from the Golf Club of Georgia in Alpharetta.

The owner? Successful golfer. But not one you see on Sundays. Not yet, anyway.

Meet David Dragoo. Georgia Tech, class of ‘09. A member of the school golf team that will compete in the NCAA regionals that start Thursday, he carries a 73.81 stroke average, and now, a monthly house payment.

His name is on the title. The down payment came from using inheritance money to invest in real estate and the stock market before both went out of bounds.

Dragoo didn’t plan to buy a home. It wasn’t his dream. Instead, he looked to rent in Atlantic Station, Decatur and Morningside, but the prices on houses for sale were good and the interest rates were great, so he chose to buy.

“It’s nice to come home to a place,” said Dragoo, who is as lean as a pin at 5-foot-6, 124 pounds. “It’s your own thing. You can do whatever you want with it. Nothing like a dorm. Nothing like it.”

That’s what made what happened next, and Dragoo’s response, so interesting.

He was at a tournament in Hawaii when the temperatures here crashed to 24 degrees on Feb. 3. Four days later, his neighbor called. “There’s water coming out of your garage,” Dragoo remembers him saying.

He asked the neighbor to go over and take a look, and what he saw wasn’t good.

A pipe had burst in a bathroom upstairs, and water had been flooding the left side of the house for what Dragoo thinks was four days. Drywall from the ceiling had fallen and created a paste on the floor. The garage’s ceiling had collapsed onto his car.

Dragoo came home and started to assess the damage. A customer-service rep from a company that deals with flooding told Dragoo he had a level-3 emergency. A hurricane is a level-5.

Dragoo went to work, calling insurance companies and contractors. This, while also handling the workload of his last semester at Tech, showing up for the golf team’s daily 5:45 a.m. workouts and afternoon practices and handling an accounting internship.

“I love GT athletics. I love being a student,” Dragoo said. “Just because you are a student doesn’t mean you can’t do stuff. Now it’s all about making sure the house is taken care of and you can pay your bills.”

It’s a much different response than what anyone might have expected two years ago, when Dragoo was a “but, this” guy, according to coach Bruce Heppler. Rather than being a problem-solver, he was a problem-imaginer.

It culminated after a summer tourney in South Carolina.

Dragoo wasn’t playing well, and called Heppler around midnight wondering what was wrong. Why couldn’t he play well? Heppler said they couldn’t get through the 30-minute conversation without Dragoo parrying his advice with “but, this” responses.

Heppler told him to cut it out.

“You’ve got to make up your mind that that’s the way it’s going to be and that you don’t have a problem,” Heppler said. “You don’t need a penny in your pocket or a ‘Tin Cup’ moment or whatever. You just need to decide that who you are and the way you do things is good enough. From that moment on he’s done a wonderful job of just making up his mind that he doesn’t have a problem.”

“It was a big turning point,” Dragoo said.

Taking that advice, and deciding to fix problems rather than let them eat him up, is how Dragoo was able to get through fixing his house. There’s still work to do, but three months after the incident the house no longer looks like a construction zone.

“I just really figured out I had all the answers,” Dragoo said. “You just have to believe in yourself.”

Through it all there are a few things he learned about buying and owning a home.

1. Take your time.

2. Do your due diligence.

3. Hire people you trust.

He’s going to spend a few months back home in Arizona this summer preparing for Q-School and will give himself three years or so to try to make it onto the PGA tour.

He might put the house up for sale, he’s not sure, but he has enjoyed the homeowning experience. And, he sees a lot of similarities between playing good golf and being a good homeowner.

“Take the time to plan what you are going to. Even when things come up that are unexpected, you keep doing what you do,” Dragoo said. “Make sure the basics are taken care of. In golf, it’s the fundamentals. For your home, you don’t lose sight of the big picture. Make sure it always looks nice, meets the codes, always presentable and ready to sell.”