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SWING AWAY: BSU women’s golf returns to the links
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The Boise State women’s golf team will take their first swing of the spring this week when they head to Fresno, Calif. for the Fresno State Lexus Challenge.
The golf team has not taken any cuts in competition since Nov. 4, but head coach Nicole Harris, who in her second year at BSU, was impressed with the way the team played during the fall.
“This is my second year and I was impressed with the improvements we made from last year to this year,” Harris said. “We also broke a lot of team records. We broke the team scoring record as well as some individual scoring records.”
Some of the improvements that Harris noticed are in the team’s short game.
“Right now, we have the 11th and 12th ranked players nationally in total short game in Iris Ocariza and Mandi Hedberg,” Harris said. “That has helped us with our overall scoring as well as with the new freshman that have come in.”
The roster for the women’s golf team is mostly freshmen. They may be young and inexperienced at the college level, but Harris holds high expectations for her young golfers.
“The [freshmen] that I recruited had strong junior golf careers,” Harris said. “I expected them to come in, play right away, taking what they had done in junior golf and get even better at the college level.”
With coach Harris’ high expectations for the freshmen, there are even higher expectations of the juniors and seniors.
“I hold them to an even higher level because they are making such big improvements and I expect that to continue,” Harris said. “All of our upper-classmen have improved their scoring averages from last year as well as from the year before so I do expect them to continue that.”
The weather through the winter months limited what the golf team can work on.
In the team’s practice facility, they cannot work on driving the ball and the team has only recently been able to get outside to practice.
“We’ve been working on a lot on putting and chipping,” Harris said. “Right now, we’ve been outside so we’ve been hitting more greens which will take pressure off the short game.”
Another aspect that Harris thought was important for the team to improve upon was confidence.
“I think that the overall confidence is something that we are going to work on,” Harris said. “I think it’s gotten much better but we are going to continue to work on it. Once they can get confident in that, I know that their scores will improve.”
The Broncos will compete in a Western Athletic Conference that has an even playing field. The schools that compete in WAC women’s golf are all very close in talent.
“We are pretty equal with the rest of the teams in the conference,” Harris said. “It could go any way between all the schools in the WAC – we have to play our best golf.”
Coach Harris is confident her team can be successful this season against the teams they will face.
“I know that this team can win it,” Harris said. “They need to know that they can. When they are competing, they have good attitudes and I know they will come through."
JOEY MCCULOUGH
Arbiter Journalist
