CHIPPING AWAY

THE WOMEN’S GOLF TEAM CONTINUES TO IMPROVE EN ROUTE TO THE NCAA REGIONALS

FRANK SINATRA’S famous lyrics, “The best is yet to come, and won’t that be fine,” help define the start of the Texas women’s golf season. For the 16thranked Longhorns, the best results are yet to come. Thanks to a fourth-place finish in the Farms Invitational at the start of April and a strong spring campaign, the women are on the fast track with plenty to look forward to. In four full-field events since February, Texas has recorded three top-five finishes with just one regular-season tournament left before commencing the championship portion of its schedule.

Seniors Madison Pressel and Desiree Dubreuil led Texas at the Farms Invitational with a pair of 12th place finishes at 9-overpar 225. The Longhorns …

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saved their lowest team score of the 54-hole tourney for the final round. In their 2012 fall opener at the Mason Rudolph Championships in Tennessee, Texas placed fourth out of 15 teams and took home a pair of top-10 individual finishes.

At the Stanford Intercollegiate in California, the Longhorns finished 17th before closing out their fall schedule with a sixth-place finish against a top-notch field at the Betsy Rawls Longhorn Invitational. The team’s scores started improving as the weather turned warmer. After a three-and-a-half month break, Texas got back to shooting low with a fourth-place finish in the Northrop Grumman in California, then battled the elements
and a field that included the top four teams in the nation to finish ninth out of 18 in the
rain-shortened Allstate Sugar Bowl Invitational in New Orleans. Texas then had another
fourth-place showing, this time in the Lady Jaguar Intercollegiate in Georgia.

While the Longhorns have put together some great team and individual rounds at each tournament, they’re still looking to close out tournaments with their best golf. “I love this team — they’re a great group of girls,” coach Martha Richards said. “We just need to be consistent. If we can do that, we’re going to be a good team. Sometimes we’re too content with making sure everything looks perfect instead of just getting the golf ball in the hole.”

The Longhorns are led by four seniors: Pressel, Dubreuil, Haley Stephens and Katelyn
Sepmoree. Those four players have led Texas in scoring in five of its seven tournaments,
with Dubreuil providing the best Longhorn finish three times (once tied with freshman Tezira Abe and once with Pressel). Dubreuil leads the team in overall scoring (74.90 per tournament round) and is the only Texas player to compete in all seven events to date.

Twice this season Bertine Strauss, a sophomore from South Africa, has been the low
Longhorn. Strauss, who was the top amateur women’s golfer in her native country before
heading to Austin, has posted four of Texas’ sub-par rounds this season (no other player has more than two). The Longhorns, who finished 13th in last season’s NCAA Championships, look to peak when they play in the NCAA Regionals from
May 9-11.

“We’ve had a great spring season, and we’re peaking at the right time for the Big 12 and NCAA Championships,” Strauss said. “Our coaches created a competitive atmosphere during the break between the fall and spring seasons, and the rewards of that are starting to shine through. If we can continue to create competition within our own team on a daily basis, we’ll be more competitive in the postseason. Our biggest goals have always been to achieve success in the postseason for Texas.”