The Seton Hall women’s golf team wrapped up its fall season on Oct. 21 and overall had a short, but successful run.
The team competed in four invitationals over the course of one month at Penn State, Princeton, Yale and the University of Delaware. At each meet, the team finished within the upper-50 percent of all competitors. The highest finish was at Delaware, where it took first place out of 13 competitors. The lowest was sixth out of 12 teams at Princeton. The two median results were third out of 17 at Yale and fourth out of 16 at Pennsylvania State.
In a short season with a quick turnaround after the summer, the team did well overall. Last fall, the results were much more mixed, however, it did end the same with a first-place finish, albeit at the Brown Bear Invitational instead.
[caption id="attachment_24846" align="aligncenter" width="838"]
Photo via SHU Athletics[/caption]
The win this fall at Delaware was especially impressive due to the high winds in which the team faced. Lizzie Win especially thrived, winning the program’s sixth individual title at the meet.
Sammie Staudt, Win’s teammate, had nothing but praise for her performance in the fall, both on and off the course.
“She came out of the summer playing phenomenal,” Staudt said. “She’s supportive of everyone. If she has a bad round, she’s supportive of the rest of us. She’s always there with great numbers and she’s been a really great leader.
Although the fall results are nice, the spring season is an entirely different animal for the team. It proves to be a much more rigorous schedule with tougher competition, and it starts when the weather is cold rather than warm.
Staudt, however, is pleased with the team’s results over the four matches and is hopeful that it can be replicated in the spring. The team already surpassed its expectations for the full year, so bigger plans are looming on the horizon.
“We reached 75 in the country right out the bat and that was our long-term goal,” Staudt said. “Getting that in the fall was pretty awesome. Our first team meeting one of our goals was to reach the top-75.”
Now that the team has done that in the fall rather than the spring, more pressure is added for results when the season commences in February.
“We have a team meeting next week,” Staudt said. “After that ranking came out, our goal was to maintain it and improve upon it.”
In terms of areas to improve upon, Staudt referenced the team’s short-game as something that head coach Natalie Desjardins would like to see get better.
“We’re going to be doing a lot of 100-yards and in,” Staudt said. “Coach has been trying to get us to focus on that because I would say it’s the weakest part of our game as a team.”
Along with that, the team wants to focus on getting out of the gate hot at matches, which it was able to do in the fall.
“We’ve been struggling with the first round as a team, so that was our goal at Delaware to come out with a good first round and we did,” Staudt explained. “We’re going to try and continue that in the spring.”
The team had a week off after the end of the season, but it will return to action in the start of November to work on these things and to ensure that the spring season is as successful as possible.
In the spring, Staudt and her teammates will compete in six difficult tournaments. Despite the challenge, the ultimate prize is certainly in view.
“Our biggest goal is to win the Big East,” Staudt said. “We’re probably going to try and win two other events besides the Big East. We’re going back to Arizona where we’re going to be the defending champs so it would be nice to win that again.
Kevin Kopf can be reached at kevin.kopf@student.shu.edu or on Twitter @KMKTNF.
Comments
