Standish Award Winners: Padraig Toole, Charles Klatt
By Greg Johnson
Charles Klatt of the University of Michigan, a caddie at Country Club of Detroit, and Padraig “Paddy” Toole of Michigan State University, a caddie at Hinsdale Golf Club in Illinois, are the 2024 winners of the James D. Standish Award.
The award is presented each year to an outstanding Evans Scholar at the MSU and Michigan chapters. The Executive Committee of the Golf Association of Michigan established the award in 1968, a year after the passing of James D. Standish, a former champion golfer, GAM and USGA president who helped Chick Evans of the Western Golf Association start the renowned caddie scholarship program.
The Standish Award winners have demonstrated scholarship and leadership in their Evans Scholar chapter’s affairs. A permanent plaque that includes the inscribed names of each year's winners is displayed in the lounge of the Evans Scholarship house on each campus, and each winner is presented with a replica of the plaque.
Klatt, a Biomolecular Science major with a 3.5 GPA, was president of the University of Michigan Evans Scholars Chapter in 2023.
“I love everything about the Evans Scholarship program and I’m honored to receive an award based off that,” he said. “I think I have gotten everything I could have ever wanted from the program. Michigan was my dream school from an early age and the 20 other scholars I came in with are my closest friends, best friends for life, and I learned so much about effort and the reward you get for it.”
Klatt plans to attend dental school after graduating in 2025 at either Michigan, Harvard or the University of Colorado.
Toole, a Mechanical Engineering major at MSU with a 3.8 GPA, also was president of his Evans chapter in 2023.
His mother, Karen, worked for the Big Ten Conference offices in Illinois and Michigan State was among the travels he made with his parents as a youngster, before his father passed away from ALS/Lou Gehrig’s disease.
“MSU became my dream school, and early on I was always decked out in green,” he said. “It didn’t look possible for a while, four hours away, out-state admission costs, but being a caddie and being an Evans Scholar changed that and made this possible.”
Toole is not named after Padraig Harrington. He said his mother picked the name out of a book because she liked it. He said the name fits.
“You can’t go wrong with a caddie named Paddy on the bag,” he said.
