SJS News

This profile originally appeared in the Spring 2025 Review.

Simon Coombs ’83 retired six years ago after working as a canine police handler in Merseyside, England for 29 years. Rather than taking it easy in retirement, Simon as taken up “all things golf.” While maintaining a single-digit handicap, Simon is a fully-qualified golf referee, heritage officer for the Wallasey Golf Club, and a professional caddie on the Ladies European Tour.

Wallasey Golf Club, located across the River Mersey from Liverpool, was founded in 1891 and has a rich history but the club’s archives were disorganized. Simon stepped in as historian and spent more than three years scanning, organizing, and cataloging materials.

“The discoveries are just fabulous because it is quite a historic golf club. It would be a shame if that history was just lost,” he said.
The club has a famous portrait of golfer Bobby Jones, painted by J.A.A. Berrie after Jones played his qualifying round for the British Open at Wallasey. 

“After his round, he [Jones] sat in front of one of our members, who was a professional artist, Mr. Berrie, and he constructed this painting,” said Simon. “Bobby Jones was so impressed by it that he signed it, and it’s the only portrait in the world that he signed.”

Simon began his journey as a professional caddie at another local course, the Royal Liverpool Golf Club (RLGC). He started by working as a permanent local caddie and became a caddie master for the 2023 Open held at RLGC. It was a chance meeting with the clubhouse professional that led Simon to the Ladies European Tour.

“Talk about being in the right place at the right time," Simon said. "I was just talking to some friends in the clubhouse, and the professional said there was a girl who needed a caddie for the day. I said, ‘That's fine, I’ve got nothing else to do.’”

The player ended up being Elena Moosmann, a Ladies European Tour player from Switzerland. After four holes, Simon impressed so much that he was asked to join Elena on tour as her caddie for the remainder of the year.

Since then, he has also caddied for Lea-Anne Bramwell from Wales and Maho Hayakawa from Japan. He explained that his sports psychology background and ability to provide mental support to players made him a valuable asset.

“As well as just turning up, carrying the bag, being professional, giving the right yards and club advice, I am able to help when the pressure was high,” he said.

Simon said his desire to caddie was not about money but just to see what life was like as an insider on a professional tour. He befriended a few other caddies whose main income came from caddying, and Simon said, “they really earn their money.”

“For me, it was just about breaking even. I would fly everywhere and stay in a decent hotel,” he said. “But these guys were jumping on trains, traveling across Europe with four of them sharing a motel room and rotating who got to sleep in the bed.”

Simon described the realities of life on tour, with a demanding schedule of waking up early and working long hours, often six days a week. While the work was challenging, Simon enjoyed traveling to many different countries and found time for sightseeing.

“I’m not going to places I’ve never been just to see the golf course,” he said. “One of my favorites was in Holland. We were staying at an Airbnb that had bicycles, and I just went off and visited the sites.”

While golf may be his sport of choice now, it was basketball that landed him at Saint James. In 1981, he was playing on a British elite team and spent four weeks traveling and playing on the East Coast of the United States.  A coach from Mercersburg Academy reached out to Simon and said there were a few schools interested in having him attend for his senior year.

“One of them was Saint James. Don Woodruff [SJS basketball coach at the time], the legend that he is, got in touch with me and kind of sold it,” said Simon. “After that one year, I wish it had been four or five years. That would have been fabulous.”

Simon said he is an organized person but can at times be lazy, so he needed discipline and structure, and “Saint James gave me that in buckets.” His year at Saint James was a transformative experience and pushed him to his limits.

“Saint James was probably the biggest learning curve in my life, and it wasn't because of the education. That was part. But it was the fact that I hadn’t really been away from home,” Simon said. “There were no mobile phones, so to speak to my parents there was a coin box at the end of a hallway on a Saturday. It made a person out of me, and that was the best education anyone could have given me.”

After one year at Gettysburg College, Simon left to play basketball professionally in the UK, most notably for the Manchester Giants and also in Liverpool. He retired after five years due to injuries with his feet. He returned to the U.S. for a year to coach at Defiance College outside of Toledo, Ohio, before heading back to England to start his career as a police officer in the K9 unit. 

Simon and his wife, Judi, live in Hoylake, UK, and have a daughter, Megan. Simon will be taking a year off from caddying as he needs surgery on both of his feet, but he said that doesn’t prevent him from playing a round of golf several times a week. While some people slow down in retirement, keeping busy is what Simon enjoys most.

“It's become a really great time of my life because I'm not at work, and I can do everything I've ever wanted, and I’m basically doing just that,” he said.