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A silence can be noted on the course as a player steps up to the tee box, takes aim and swings, all while hoping to not shank the ball.
This silence can only mean one thing, the spring 2012 golf season has arrived at Augusta State University and this past August the women’s golf team welcomed Kory Thompson, its new coach, who said she was excited to join the team.
“It was a good opportunity,” Thompson said. “The men are coming off of back-to-back national championships, so the level of support here for golf in general in the Augusta area is really good, so that was a main deciding factor. The women’s team has always had a good reputation and been good as well, so for me it was a good career move from where I was before.”
Even though she is new to the women’s team, Thompson said she is not planning on doing anything different to prepare for the season because with golf, there is not much to do different. But what the team is working on is improving its putting and the small things that have a big impact on its scores. To help improve its scores, the team is practicing and playing as much as it can.
“We play a lot because you have to learn the score, no matter what you have to get the ball in the hole,” Thompson said. “I think our main focus is usually short game and then just playing, just getting used to the pressure of going out and playing against your teammates. If it’s not that, it’s usually 70 to 80 percent short game.”
To assist it in dealing with the pressure, the eight-member team, which is only allowed to practice 20 hours a week, practices five days a week as a team and works out three mornings a week, Thompson said. But when they are not busy practicing with the team, many of the players practice on their own to help prepare them for the qualifying matches.
For every event it attends, the team can bring five players, and to determine the players who will participate, the team plays a qualifying match against each other, Thompson said. The players who end up playing are the ones with the five best scores.
While all of the players are working hard to qualify for matches, at least one of the players is working on her red-shirt this semester and that is Stephanie Bennett, a freshmen psychology major and the only new member of the women’s golf team. Bennett said she is looking forward to something particular about this season.
“The experience, because I’m trying to redshirt, so I’ll get one year of just being consumed with golf,” Bennett said. “Then I’ll have that year under my belt and I’ll still have four years to be eligible (to play golf).”
What redshirting means is that a player, who has five years of eligibility, can take a year off to where they do not participate in any of the tournaments, but still partake in practice to qualify for the matches and still have four years to participate in the tournaments, Bennett said.
But while Bennett is redshirting this semester, at least one of the other players has one thing on her mind and that is making it to nationals, said Marit Bjerke, a junior marketing major on the team.
“(Because) we did so bad at the end of last semester, we would like to do really well this semester so we can make it to regionals and hopefully to the nationals,” Bjerke said. “We made it to the regionals last year, (so) it would be nice to make it to nationals this year.”
This goal of making it to regionals and nationals is also shared by Thompson, who making it to nationals is the teams’ main goal this season. The journey to regionals and nationals began with the teams’ first tournament Feb. 12 in Florida.