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Wednesday, 30 April 2008 |
Glen Strandberg
Sports Editor
It may lack the drama of an overtime playoff game in a sport like hockey, but the Forest Lake girls golf team had to go five deep in its batting order to determine a winner against Woodbury last Thursday.
At Hastings Country Club on April 24, both the Rangers and the Royals finished the Suburban East Conference meet with identical team totals of 184. The score is arrived by adding the top four individual rounds, so the tie-breaker moves on to the No. 5 finisher.
“We came as close to beating Woodbury today as humanly possible, but in the end we let one slip away,” head coach Joel Hall said on Thursday night. “I would like to say we played well, but we still haven’t done that yet.”
Mallory Messin and Betsy Kelly turned in matching 44s, while Lea Jondal of Cretin-Derham Hall was the medalist after shooting a 41.
The next two Rangers were Emily Wislicenus (45) and Brittany Seifert (51), and then Katie Nowicki (54) and Lauren Gravelle (58) rounded out the six Forest Lake golfers.
Coach Hall plans on seeing lower scores from the entire lineup, and the girls had plenty of opportunities to show him before the calendar turns to May.
The Rangers were at Stillwater on Monday, Elk River on Tuesday and Cretin on Wednesday.
“It’s not falling on any one person right now; we all need to pick each other up in order to help this team get to where the ability is,” Hall said. “We need to tell ourselves it’s still early, and with hard work we’ll see those scores drop as the season progresses.”
And if you think Hall is comfortable losing another close one to Woodbury, think again.
“Having it come down to one stroke like that is so tough to take,” he shared. “One putt gives us the match.”
2nd again
At Monday’s meet in Stillwater, it was more of the same for the Rangers.
Though the girls aren’t firing like they can, they did play better, but still came in second to the Royals.
“I have to hand it to Woodbury, their depth is what is separating them from us right now,” Hall said. “If we want to compete with them, which I am sure we can, we need to have everyone doing the little things right.”
Kelly’s score of 40 gave her medalist honors, with Messin tying for third at 43.
Wislicenus struggled with her putter and turned in a 51, giving Nowicki an opening to slide in with a 50.
“I don’t want to sound like I’m disappointed with second place, but we’ll hopefully start to show that we are a team that has lower scores in its system like we know we do,” Hall concluded.
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