Calem Filipek bombs away: 15-year-old Menlo Park resident wins Amateur Long Drive contest with 400-yard shot

Filipek, a 15-year-old Menlo Park resident and a rising sophomore at Bellarmine, has played golf for most of his life. His father, Eric, is a low-index golfer who plays competitively. In fact, Filipek made the Bellarmine golf team, which went on to win the Central Coast Section title, but Calem Filipek opted to play baseball instead.

But Filipek has used his newfound love of golf and turned it into a pair of long-drive contest wins, including one last week in Davis during which the 5-11, 155-pound Filipek launched a 404.6-yard drive to win the Open Division title at the Northern California Amateur Long Drive contest.

His blast was nearly 10 feet further than the runner-up distance of 395 yards.

“I definitely thought I crushed the ball,” Filipek said. “I’ve never hit it 400. At the tournament, that was the goal.”

The tournament format features three sessions, during which time a contestant gets two minutes to drive six balls out to a 50-foot wide grid. The ball needs to come to rest inside the grid for the drive to be counted. The longest drive of each session is marked and the longest of those three is the mark presented as a competitor’s longest drive.

Filipek, who won his first contest in May with a drive in the 350-yard range, opened his first session last week with a best of 355 feet. But in his second session, he dropped to 335.5.

At that point, a long-drive coach who was in attendance gave Filipek a slight grip tweak heading into his final session.

“He told me my swing is so fast that when I contact the ball, even though [the clubface] looked square, it was actually closed (at impact),” Filipek said. “He told me to start the clubface open.”

Filipek said his first three swings in his final session did not feel comfortable.

“The first three balls with the new grip were terrible. They were well hit, but not in the grid,” Filipek said. “On the fourth, I changed my feet a little and the fifth one (the 404-yard shot), [the new grip] definitely made a difference. It had a nice, long draw (right-to-left curve).”

“After he hit the ball, there is a guy out there (in the grid) with a walkie-talkie,” Eric Filipek said. “The dude was like, ‘That was a bomb! And it’s still rolling.’ It was past the Yeti sign that was 400-yards out.

“He had the perfect launch angle with a high, soft draw, so he got maximum carry distance then got the kick and the forward roll.”

While it used to be commonplace that professional long-drive competitors would use custom-sized clubs, most organizations — including the Amateur Long Drive group — now require that all clubs conform to USGA standards. That being said, even the top amateur hitters use specialized equipment that still falls within regulations.

“These guys will use four-times stiff steel shafts. Longer shafts. Custom heads,” Eric Filipek said.”

Calem Filipek accomplished his winning drive with his dad’s new club — an off-the-rack TaylorMade Sim 2 with an extra-stiff graphite shaft — and spent only about five minutes of practice time with it before the tournament.

It was a new club because Calem Filipek had cracked the shaft on his dad’s previous driver while playing a round in Tahoe.

Calem Filipek’s enjoyment of the game of golf really took off during the pandemic and when he started to consistently out-drive his dad during their rounds of golf, he started looking into long-drive contests.

“Only when I started to out-drive my dad by 40 yards every time (did I start to think about long-drive contests),” Calem Filipek said.

There were no local contests, however, so he put his search on the backburner until this past spring, when he found the Nor Cal chapter of the Amateur Long Drive organization.

Now he’s 2 for 2 and is looking for more. Filipek has plans to enter a couple more Nor Cal tournaments next month and is aiming for a national tournament appearance in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina later this summer.

“I’m going to spend some extra time on the driving range and try to replicate tournaments,” Filipek said. “But then I’ll just try to incorporate it when I’m playing a round (of golf).”