LUERS GIRLS GOLF – A DAY TO REMEMBER

Our Bishop Luers girl’s golf team had a day to talk about! All 5 girls shot a career best 18-hole score in competition!

On the same day! That’s almost unbelievable!
And McMillen was set up tough for a regulation Par 70 course, and it was extremely long. Many tees were way back at the “Tips”, which is having the tees at the very back part of the longest tees.  McMillen, though an “Executive Course”, has always played long on most holes for the par on each hole. By that I mean that there’s only 2 easy Par 3’s (right in front of the clubhouse), and only 1 or 2 easy par 4’s to even make a par on! The rest of the holes are long par 3’s and long par 4’s.

The golf tournament began with a “Shotgun” start, with each girl starting on a different hole, with a different group. Luers’ girls started on holes #16, 17, 18, and hole #1. That means that most of our first 9-12 holes were on the tough front 9, with 4 holes played through the troublesome woods. I would have rather played a bunch of “open” holes early to hopefully get in the groove first. But the Luers’ girls started out fairly well, despite some troubles in the woods. And though 3 of the girls shot 49 or 50 on the front 9, Sarah Braun had a 46 and Katie Prendergast fired a lifetime best 41!  No one shot anything like a 55, or anything near that high. Our 185 total was a very good start on the toughest nine!

Now the Back 9.
Nobody shot lights out on the Back 9, like KP did on the front. But we had a lot of balance with 4 girls firing between 46 and 48. Madi and Sarah led the way. We shot a 187 on the back. The individual totals were as follows: KP shot 89, Sarah had 92, Madi shot 95, Katie Leja had 97, and Grace had 99.  WOW!  All 5 girls in the 90s…except KP’s fantastic 89! They count the best 4 scores out of the 5 girls from each team. We can’t do much better than we did. As a team we shot 373! That score was 40 shots better than our PREVIOUS BEST!  That was a 413 that we shot in the Concordia Invite earlier this fall. 40 shots better is an improvement of 10 strokes per girl! So we finished in a solid 3rd place. The Luers’ team was way behind the Champions, our friendly Catholic rivals, Bishop Dwenger. But only 2 strokes behind 2nd place Snider!

Though we didn’t know this out on the course, we were ahead of Snider by a couple strokes for 2nd place with each of the Luers’ girls having one hole left. Counting the 4 girl’s scores that we ended up using, Madi had a bogey. That’s okay. But the other 3 girls had a double, triple and a quadruple bogey on the last hole, respectively. But you might say we still won the “season series” with Snider overall, because we knocked them off at their own home course by 4 strokes a week earlier. I really do believe we became the 2nd best team in the SAC by years end.

By the way, we lost to Northrup by 11 strokes when we played them in August. In this SAC Tournament, we beat them by 41 strokes! Also, in early August, we played in the Concordia Invite. And Concordia finished 36 strokes ahead of BLHS. Then a couple weeks later, we lost to them by just 3, in our head-to-head match. Well, in this SAC Tourney, we beat them by 13 strokes, also on their home course.

Individually, we had 2 of our golfers, Katie Prendergast and Sara Braun make the ALL-SAC CONFERENCE TEAM! Plus Madi Jennings was only 3 shots away from making ALL-SAC herself! Even Katie Leja and Grace Everett finished in the top 17, which means all 5 of our lovely ladies finished in the top half of all the girls in the tourney. KP led us with 5 pars and a birdie. Madi had 5 pars too. Grace had 3 pars, KL had 2 and Sarah had just one par, but a very solid and steady round. She is very calm…a great recipe for golf! Also, we had 4 of our 5 girls under par in Putting too. Madi and KP had an amazing 31 putts each, 5 under par! Sarah had 34 putts, and Grace had an even par total of 36 putts. As a team, we were 5 under par in Putts overall.

All 5 Luers girls shooting their lowest score ever, all on the same day!

I’m SO PROUD of my girls!
Coach Tom