By Harrison Leone
Sports Assignment Editor
As the fall season draws to a close, the golf team will stow its nine-irons and putters until the milder days of spring. The team closed its first five weeks of play last Tuesday after competing in six invitationals. As per NCAA regulations, the team will not be able to practice together until a new semester begins in January.
Coach John Powers said this break in the action is one of the most difficult parts of playing a split-season sport.
“The hard part is just losing that rhythm that you gather throughout the course of the summer and the fall,” Powers said.
Redshirt sophomore Darren Simons agreed that the time off from regular routines, including tournament competition and guided practices, is trying for the players.
“Yeah, I would say it’s difficult,” Simons said. “You’re off all winter, and it’s tough to get right back into it. With that time off, you don’t really get to practice outside, and it can mess with your rhythm.”
Powers was quick to add that the time off, while a major interruption to the team’s dynamic, is not entirely negative.
“Sometimes, though, there are positives to be taken from it, too,” Powers said. “The guys have been practicing and playing every day since January, so like with any sport, there’s time when you need to take a step away for a couple weeks. In our case, it’s a couple months, but just to hit the reset button. It’s good opportunity to kind of start with a clean slate. It’s not all bad.”
Powers said he plans to have his players fine-tune their swings and make what adjustments they need to their games during the break. Additionally, the team will work on staying in shape and will continue to work on their conditioning.
“We’ll do one-on-one reviews with everybody so everybody’s kind of familiar with what we want. We all want to be on the same page with where we’re at,” Powers said. “We’re not officially allowed to start practicing again until January, so all the stuff that they do is going to have to be on their own. The organized stuff we do has to do more with strength and conditioning. It’s a good chance to mix things up and get a fresh start in the spring.”
Powers said the training his team does during the offseason is geared mostly towards fitness and bears similar resemblance to other intensive training sports.
“Our strength coach leads the workouts and incorporates a lot of different things to help build up our endurance, our legs and our core, with those being the main three focal points,” Powers said. “We train to be athletes. The conditioning side of things can be anything from playing basketball to doing the insanity workouts. On the strength side of things, we try to keep the tempo up and do some circuit training, similar to what you’d see with cross fit or other kinds of high-intensity programs like P90x.”
The team will be aided this offseason by a new piece of equipment: an indoor launch monitor that is able to track the predicted flights of balls hit indoors. This will allow the team to get a more accurate reading of the strengths and weaknesses of their swings.
“It’s able to measure the speed and rotation of golf balls in a way that allows it to put out an image or representation of what that ball will do once it sees 10 revolutions and so on,” Powers said. “It can simulate what that ball will do and how far it will go with amazing accuracy. It’s going to be huge to get that feedback over the winter, rather than just beating balls into a net, which is what we’ve been doing for the past 20 years.”
With the workouts, indoor practices and one-on-one meetings, the team will try to build on a fall season that saw them win two invitational meets while never finishing outside of the top 10 in the others. The wins at the Leo Keenan and the Little Three Invitationals are what make Powers feel confident about the skill of his team.
“There were definitely some bright spots, especially with the Leo Keenan and Little Three Invitationals,” Powers said. “The tournaments that we put together and had the real high finishes we were happy with, and then the other ones, we might not have ended up right where we wanted to, but there was at least one round in every event where we showed what we were capable of. Now it’s just a matter of finding the consistency to do that more often. That’s something that will keep coming along with experience.”
Simons said he believes his team, while at times inconsistent, lived up to the anticipations that the players had for the season.
“We came pretty close to the expectations,” Simons said. “We know we’re not going to win every tournament, obviously, but we competed pretty well, especially compared to other schools in our area.”
In addition to Simons, who earned Atlantic 10 Golfer of the Week in early October, the team was led by sophomore Josh Stauffer. Stauffer carded the lowest score for the Bonnies in three of the fall tournaments. Freshman Trent McPherson provided additional help, finishing second on the team at the last invitational in Dayton.
“Trent was regular for us all fall, and he would be the first to tell you that he had rounds he was happy with and rounds that he needed to be a little bit better,” Powers said of his freshman player. “Having this semester under his belt, he’ll start to show some more consistency in the spring.”
Simons said that McPherson and freshman Evan Sommer have done well entering into the chemistry of the team and adjusting to the competition of college golf.
“They both played really well,” Simons said “I know that my first time golfing in college it was pretty tough, but they handled it well.”
Looking forward to the spring season, Simons was optimistic about his team’s chances to finish near the top of the A-10.
“I would say we can definitely finish in the top half,” Simons said. “We have to practice hard here in the winter, and when we get back outside, whenever that may be, hopefully it will all come together.”
Powers said his team will be facing stronger competition in the latter half of the season. With the conference championships in April, much of the spring semester will be used to prepare to get the players and lineups set for the final match.
“Everything that we do is in preparation for the A-10 championship in April,” Powers said. “The first couple tournaments, we don’t really have any outdoor practices to go off of, so we’ll see how that pans out. The courses and the conditions that we’re playing in are going to be a lot tougher in the spring, so we’ll get to find out how tough we are.”
