This article originally appeared in the March issue of NCGA Golf Magazine
Celebrating Some of the 2025 Club Champions In the NCGA Region
Stories by Nick Lozito
Like Father, Like Daughter
Tracy Elser, the 2025 women’s club champion at Greenhorn Creek Resort in Angels Camp, has spent most of her life around golf. Her father, Dixon Robb, was a television page for NBC and aspiring scriptwriter before finding his calling as a head golf professional.
Dixon’s creativity wasn’t stifled in his new line of work. It’s what set him apart.
“I still hear his lessons,” Tracy says, recalling swing theories her father would expound over the family dinner table. “Keep your weight back, left arm firm.”
Tracy Elser helped her father give lessons and carry out his “theatrical” member golf tournaments at River Island Country Club in Porterville, where Dixon was the first head professional in the late 1960s. There was a Viking-themed tournament where Dixon shot flaming arrows through the winner’s names; and a member-built showboat where Dixon handed out prizes on the first tee.
Tracy built her own passion for golf. The family moved to Santa Cruz where Tracy often played golf with her brothers at Seascape Golf Course in Aptos. She married a head golf professional, Don Elser, and began working as a dental assistant in Capitola. She raised and taught golf to sons Brian and Sean and made time to play the great courses across California with her family.
Elser later retired and moved to Calaveras County. There, she married her second husband, Cort Hellenthal, a building contractor, and joined the women’s golf club at Greenhorn Creek.
“Golf has really been wonderful to me,” said Elser, whose favorite foursome is with her sons and brother Coult. Golf, she said, has opened “experiences and thrills that I couldn’t believe at this amateur level.”
In 2023, though, after winning her first club championship, Elser was playing four or five times per week and “needed something else.”
Enter Nelson’s Columbia Candy Kitchen, a 100-year staple in the Sierra foothills with shops in Columbia, Murphys and Sonora. “I just saw an ad in the window for job openings,” recalls Elser, who packages and sells toffee, almond bark and chocolate creams, with fellow golf members stopping by the store. “From dentistry to candy. It felt like a weird move.
“My friends joke that I’m creating more work.”
She laughs at all the unexpected thrills the game has given her.
“Golf is like a box of chocolates,” Tracy said.
The game has been extra sweet lately.
In 2023, Elser served as a marshal at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and spent time at Spyglass Hill with friends Debbie Miller and Joni Nelson. She has volunteered as a golf coach with the local high school, Bret Harte, and once won a trip to Florida by making a hole-in-one. At a tournament at Sequoia Woods, she entered a putting contest through a raffle and made $5,000 by sinking a 60-footer. Topping Elser’s bucket list is to play a round with her grandkids — Emery, 5; Wyatt, 3; Sadie, 2; and Taylor, 1.
At the club championship this past September, Elser ran away from the field with rounds of 89 and 92.
“I don’t get bored playing this course,” she said of Greenhorn Creek, where golfers can see geese, deer, foxes, quails and doves during a round. Her favorite hole is the par-5 18th, with bunkers down both sides of the fairway and a lake protecting an undulating green.
“You can bail out right,” Elser said, “but to me that’s a waste of a stroke.”
The women’s club has grown to 70 members, some who now expect a sweeter experience from their confection connection. “Where is my candy today?” they joke with the reigning champion.
“I’ve been a lucky golfer,” Elser said. “I just love it. I get a thrill out of hitting a long and making a long putt.”