By Dylan Fink | Sports Writer
Fairways have been found, tees have been topped and putts have been placed all year for Baylor men’s and women’s golf. The two teams can now look ahead to the one tournament that’s been on their minds since August: the Big 12 Championships.
“Our whole goal this season [was] to get a little bit better each day from September to May,” women’s head coach Jay Goble said. “If we can be a little bit better each day then we have the chance to compete for both a conference and national championship again.”
The women’s team has had one of the most competitive seasons the program has seen in a while, but has yet to quite make the leap to their full potential.
The Bears have floated around the lower end of the nation’s top 25 rankings this season after a multitude of excellent tournament finishes. The Rainbow Wahine Invitational in Hawaii was the Bears’ only first-place finish.
The No. 2 spot became a magnet of sorts for the Bears, as they finished second in five of their 11 tournaments this season.
With the conference championship tournament right around the corner, the team expects to break out of the hold of second place and dominate a familiar field.
“Obviously it’s championship season, so something important for us is to just avoid being burnt out when May rolls around,” junior Yurang Li said. “I don’t have a lot of expectations for the season, but really I just want to continue to build and play my game and hopefully win with my teammates.”
The Bears are anticipating a high-level performance at the Big 12 Championship at the Dallas Athletic Club. The Dallas course is known to be similar to Waco’s Ridgewood Country Club, where the team regularly practices.
“It feels a lot like Ridgewood, and Ridgewood’s old greenskeeper is the guy taking care of the golf course,” Goble said. “So I like it for us. And I think the Big 12 Championships are wide open because there’s a bunch of us in that 15 to 25 range that could all do it.”
The men’s sailing has not been as smooth this season. A rough fall, which saw only one top-five finish for the team, preceded an unexpected coaching change in January.
When coaching legend Mike McGraw announced he was stepping away from the program on Jan. 21 due to his wife’s health issues, it was easy to write the struggling Bears off for the spring. Interim head coach Ryan Murphy had other plans.
The Bears, now under new direction, found the fire they needed this spring with three top-five finishes in just four tournaments. The spring campaign included a season-high second-place finish at the Sam Ryder Invitational in Daytona Beach, Fla., and a third-place finish at the Maridoe Collegiate Invitational in Dallas.
The Big 12 Championship will prove a harder test for the men, as they travel to Hutchinson, Kan., to compete at the Prairie Dunes Country Club. The course is regarded as one of the most difficult in collegiate golf and is the regular host of the NCAA Division I national championships.
The Bears will seek to rest up and prepare for the course over the next week as they come off of the Mountaineer Invitational in West Virginia. The tournament was their worst performance of the spring, placing 10th in the 20-team field.
“Pete Dye Golf Club was a terrific golf course and test … extremely challenging,” Murphy said. “We had some nice rounds this week, although our finish was not what we had in mind. We will get some rest once back in Waco, and then our preparation for Prairie Dunes will begin.”
The women’s championship will begin April 23 in Dallas, while the men will kick off their championship pursuits on April 27 in Hutchinson, Kan.
