Former Jamestown Country Club manager sentenced in theft case

Former Jamestown Country Club manager Shawn Patrick Taft was sentenced to two days in the Stutsman County Correctional Center, with credit for two days already served, after pleading guilty to theft of property.

Judge James Shockman also placed the 59-year-old Billings, Montana, resident on two years of unsupervised probation and ordered him to notify the court if his address changes. The clerk of district court said restitution had already been paid before the hearing on Tuesday, May 26.

The case centered on money taken from a club that has been part of Jamestown for generations. Jamestown Country Club was registered as a North Dakota nonprofit corporation on June 27, 1921, and its golf course opened for play in 1963. The club describes itself as the “best private course between Bismarck and Fargo,” a phrase that underscores how long it has stood as one of the city’s more recognizable private institutions.

Prosecutors said the misconduct ran from Feb. 1, 2019, through Dec. 31, 2024, and involved unauthorized transfers, misuse of checks and other financial activity tied to the club’s accounts. Court documents also described 67 separate payments into Taft’s personal charge account. Taft had originally been accused of taking more than $95,000 from the club over nearly six years, with the charge handled as a Class A felony before being reduced to a misdemeanor. A separate count of unauthorized use of personal identifying information was dismissed.

Taft’s local profile made the case resonate beyond the clubhouse. He coached the Jamestown High School boys golf team from April 2022 to May 2024, after the school had struggled to fill the job. Jamestown High School did not have a boys golf season in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Blue Jays had gone through several head coaches in the years before Taft took over.

For Jamestown Country Club members, the sentence closes one chapter of a case built around trust, bookkeeping and access to member money. The club’s long history, and Taft’s ties to the school golf program, made the theft feel local in a way that went beyond the dollar figure alone.