By: James Barkley, Contributing Writer
It appears the men’s golf team is off to a solid start this season. The team is old, with three seniors and five juniors on the roster. Stacked with upperclassman leadership, they’re poised to make a run at the Southern Conference Championship. According to Jeremy Grab ’17, the captain, the team has made some interesting moves in the offseason.
“We added a transfer from Coastal Carolina named Harrison Frye and a freshman named Walker Simas,” he says. “Both are really solid players that have the potential to go low and take our team to the next level. This is our year to take the SoCon Championship. The other perennial top teams in the conference have all lost their star players, whereas our team has most of its returning members.”
Among the other seniors on the team, Andrew Novak is having a spectacular year. Novak is making his case to be the Southern Conference Player of the Year, as he has yet to finish outside the top 10 in any tournament this season and has surpassed Wofford’s own William McGirt’s three collegiate wins. Novak was also recently named SoCon Men’s Golfer of the Week for the week of March 1-7 after he placed ninth at the Cleveland Golf Palmetto Intercollegiate. This past performance will help his national ranking, which stands at 59th as of now. Novak, along with the rest of the squad, look to carry this momentum toward some of the crucial, late season tournaments.
One of the more important tournaments coming up is the Gary Koch Invitational. Hosted in Gastonia, N.C. by two highly ranked teams in Kentucky and Auburn, this event will attract “some of the best teams and therefore the best players in the country,” says Grabs. The team will then look to compete in the Southern Conference Championship, where a win would result in an automatic bid to the NCAA regionals.
The Women’s Team has similar goals this season. They have competed in two tournaments this Spring thus far, the Kiawah Island Classic, finishing 29th, and the UNF Collegiate, where they finished 16th. At Kiawah, Freshman Grace Massengill, who shot a total of 230 over the three days, led the Terriers. At the UNF Collegiate, junior Nicole Chin led the way for Wofford by shooting a combined score of 236 over the course of the tournament. Over the weekend the women traveled to Hilton Head for the Low Country Intercollegiate, and on April 2 they will head to Morganton, N.C. to compete in the Mimosa Hills Intercollegiate. After those two tournaments, the next stop will be competing and winning the Southern Conference Championship.
In terms of building towards the future, two players have committed to the 2017 class. Anna Eddy, from Summerville, S.C., and Abigail Bloom, from Ashburn, VA, both look to be promising additions to the team this fall. This team hopes to build on a successful season this year and welcome the new golfers in the upcoming season.