A freshman-heavy UW-Eau Claire women’s golf team edged out a pair of top-ranked teams en route to a second-of-nine finish at Saturday’s Wartburg Spring Invitational in Iowa.
The Blugolds finished 38 over par with 326 strokes, falling just five shots behind winner Gustavus Adolphus College (Minn.), and beating the University of St. Thomas (Minn.) and Wartburg College (Iowa) by three strokes and nine strokes, respectively.
Gustavus was ranked second in the country in the most recent National Golf Coaches Association Div. III coaches poll, which was released March 4. St. Thomas and Wartburg were ranked fifth and ninth, respectively, while the Blugolds placed 12th in the poll.
“If we can’t win, we just need to beat the teams that are ranked ahead of us,” coach John Means said after the invite. “Since we didn’t win the conference championship we don’t have an automatic bid to the national championship, so any time we play a team that’s ranked ahead of us our goal is to beat them.”
Two Blugolds finished in the top 20, with four more placing better than 30th in the 56-player field. Junior Torie Ives took second place with a 76-stroke, four-over-par finish, falling behind St. Thomas’ Laura Heck, who beat Ives in a playoff after both women tied.
Freshman Katie Maurer tied for third place with a 78-stroke, six-over-par showing.
“She’s just going to get better and better,” Means said of Maurer, who took first place individually at the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference championship at the end of the fall season.
Freshmen Lauren Gault, Jamie Hauser and Sara Mattes finished in a seven-way tie for 22nd place with 86 strokes, and sophomore Katie Swift pulled a tie for 29th place with 87 strokes.
Freshman Emily Swift rounded out the Blugolds’ roster, finishing in a three-way tie for 36th place with 89 strokes.
The second round of the invitational was scheduled for Sunday but was cancelled due to expected weather conditions, according to a university press release. Between three and five inches of snow were expected to fall Sunday in Waverly, Iowa – the site of the event – according to the National Weather Service’s Web site.
Means said Saturday’s weather wasn’t propitious either, noting that strong winds at the course made playing conditions “brutal.”
Eau Claire’s second-place finish improved the team’s spring record to 9-2 and its overall record to 78-15-1 this year. The Blugolds took second of four last month at the Dutch Desert Shootout in Arizona, the team’s spring season opener, and are scheduled to play Friday and Saturday at the Carleton College Invitational (Minn.).
Means said his team, which carries 10 freshmen on a 12-person roster, needs one more player to step up down the spring season stretch.
“We just have to get one player to step up and say ‘put the ball in my hands,'” he said. “And we’ve got three or four girls who can do it; we just need one of them to wake up one morning and say, ‘Hey, give me the ball.'”
