Golf to disabled vets

Jim Rounsavell knows panic, and he knows veterans, and he knows post-traumatic stress disorder, and he knows golf.

Besides playing and loving the game, Rounsavell has used it to fight off nocturnal panic attacks by visualizing the beauty of the courses he played as a young man.

Now, with the help of the newly invigorated Four Robin Hoods charity group of Sacramento and the Sierra Health Foundation, he has obtained a $24,000 ParaGolfer cart that enables people who can’t walk or stand to play the game on their own from tee to flag.

Rounsavell and his wife, Jeanne, hope it can help them make the therapeutic aspects of golf available to vets to help them deal with PTSD and other debilitating effects of war.

But through their nonprofit Veterans Golf Park for Disabled Vets, they did raise enough money three years ago to buy the old Sylvan School House in Citrus Heights.

An Army private in Panama toward the end of World War II who re-enlisted to a stateside Air Force mechanic’s job during the Korean War, Jim Rounsavell got motivated to help veterans when his wife’s son from a previous marriage came home from his first tour in the Iraq War with his mind messed up.

“Golf is good therapy because it’s played in a happy place,” Rounsavell said this week, sitting in the old schoolhouse-turned-veteran’s center.

First, the Rounsavells plan to get the disabled vets comfortable with the cart indoors, in the veteran’s center, where the prospects will learn to operate it and lower themselves on a lift to chip balls into a backstop-type device that Jeanne fashioned years ago.

At some point, Rounsavell said he’ll be looking for volunteers to help him help the vets learn the game.