Over the past weekend, the UW-Whitewater Women’s Golf team traveled to Florida to compete in the Golfweek October Classic which took place over the course of three days. The Warhawks placed 18th out of 24 teams, competing against some of the best teams in the country.
“Going into it, we were pretty excited because the Golfweek Classic is a really big tournament that has just the best teams in the country invited, and so it has kind of a national tournament type field,” head coach Andrea Wieland said. “And we know that because we won our conference that we will be invited to nationals in the spring so we were kind of excited to see how we could stack up against them. We had heard that the golf course was going to be really not in great shape because of some excessive heat that they had had there earlier this summer. So we just did our regular preparation because we weren’t exactly sure what we were going to face when we got there.”
When the team got to actually play on the course, they found the greens to be immensely slow compared to others they had throughout the year. Due to that, the team had some adjusting to do.
“Our first round was just not great,” Wieland said. “We just didn’t hit a lot of great golf shots since we were having a hard time adjusting to those slow greens. We also kind of took that mentality that like, we’re just gonna go out and try to learn something and learn from our bad round mistakes and then just play better the next day. And we did play a little better the second day, which was good. But for the third day we finally made some good adjustments and played really well, so that was a good way to finish.”
The team agreed with that sentiment, even though some of the golfers have had really great seasons.
“Obviously for some of us it wasn’t our best round,” junior golfer Kallie Lux said. “I had one of my worst college rounds there but like Andrea said, it was just conditions of the course, I was getting used to those slower greens. But I finished out the last days fairly well, so it was good and bad. Overall though I think the season was great for the team in general and all of the top five individually. I had one of my best seasons. We all bonded as a team this year for sure.”
Another golfer who had a standout season was junior Ellie Johnson. She broke a school record, but even she was tripped up a little from this course.
“Going into it, we were feeling really good as a team obviously,” Johnson said. “We had just won conference so you know, this was kind of our fun tournament where we get to go and hang out in Florida and get some good competition against some teams that we’re going to be seeing at Nationals as Andrea said. Overall, I feel really happy with how it was and how it ended up. I had not a great first day, just kind of really didn’t feel like myself, I was just adjusting to the greens like everyone else. I can’t say enough that these were honestly some of the slowest greens that I may have ever played on in my life. Over the next few days, I slowly started feeling much better. The mentality just kind of started to click, and I think it’s a great note to end on for the season.”
The consensus for the team was that this was another successful season, even if one classic didn’t go as smoothly as it could’ve. The team managed to get the WIAC championship, and so the next steps are to just prepare for the spring season and get some resting in.
“Our main goal every year is to win our conference championships, which we obviously accomplished,” Wieland said. “I think everybody would have liked to have played better in a few rounds that we had this year, but we did win three tournaments and then one conference. So we feel pretty good with the fall season that we had, so I think we had a good mix of some good competition. Now we are just looking forward to the spring.”
