On a weekend that saw marked improvement from round to round, the BGSU women’s golf team was ultimately not able to move to the top of the field. They finished the Mid-American Conference Championship yesterday in eighth and last place.
Despite the low finish, the weekend saw each player on the team record a personal-best score at some point. Sophomore Carley Hrusovsky also set a MAC tournament record for score improvement between rounds. After shooting an 87 in round one, the North Canton native fired off an impressive 73 in round two, a 14 shot improvement. Hrusovsky said she tried every round to play smart and minimize her mistakes, but her round one score may have been due to pressure she put on herself to perform well.
“Going in, I was feeling stress because of playing and finals coming up,” Hrusovsky said. “I just wasn’t prepared. But in the second round, I just went through and didn’t make mistakes.”
Kent State took home the MAC Championship with rounds of 295-289-298-284.
Along with Hrusovsky’s record-setting performance, other members of the team put up some great scores. Fellow sophomore Jessica McCann carded a 75 in the first round. Junior Kari Liggett had back-to-back 77’s in rounds three and four. Amanda Bader shot a personal record of 82 in round two. Team co-captain Amanda Schroeder scored a MAC tournament personal best of 79 in round three.
Schroeder, the team’s lone senior, was playing in her last career college tournament. Her scores of 84-83-79-84 over the four rounds were good enough to leave her in 38th place in her final go-round for BG.
“I’m kind of sad that it’s over,” Schroeder said. “I was hoping that I would have played better than I did. I put a lot of pressure on myself, but overall it was a good tourney.”
As their finish shows, even with all of the great individual rounds, and also two great team scores in rounds three and four of 317 and 315, the Falcons had areas of the game where they could’ve done better. According to Schroeder, while her driver was deadly accurate -she only missed a handful of fairways the entire weekend – the other clubs in her bag left something to be desired.
“I could’ve improved my iron play,” Schroeder said. “I didn’t hit enough greens.”
Ironically, Hrusovsky’s problems were the exact opposite of Schroeder’s.
“I didn’t hit my driver well the whole weekend,” Hrusovsky said.
Although the team took steps in the right direction, there were still things everybody could’ve improved on in terms of lowering scores, according to coach Stephanie Young.
“We didn’t make birdies like we thought we would,” Young said. “The other teams seemed to put it all together at the same time.”
In the case of the MAC tournament, the team finishes don’t tell the whole story. While finishing in last place, BG golfers put up some great individual rounds. In the end, there were plenty of positives.
“It wasn’t the finish we would’ve liked, but we improved every day,” Young said. “One day or the other, everybody had a career MAC round. There were three milestones reached. Confidence is still high.”
