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Editorial: Golf teams succeed in shuffle
Op-Ed · June 02, 2016


What a wonder to watch West Branch High School’s girls and boys golf teams this season. And congratulations to the girls for breaking through that first round of regionals for the first time in 18 years!


Both teams started the season in very different positions.

The girls team started with 30 players, giving them enormous depth in the largest team ever led by Head Coach Jan O’Neil. They brought back six players with at least some varsity experience from the previous year and three of four of them with regular starting positions.

The boys team started with half the players as the girls team, and nearly half of the roster were freshmen. Head Coach Randy Sexton had just two upperclassmen starters return, and a third starter only had one year with the team as he was just a sophomore.

Then there was the extra challenge — the one no other team in the River Valley Conference had to face: No home course.

On the first day of practice, owners of Fox Run Golf & Country Club announced in an e-mail to the coaches that the course was closed. Both teams had to make due practicing outside on the high school’s side yards or inside the new gym, driving plastic balls into a net.

Thankfully, school leaders worked out an arrangement that allowed the teams to return to Fox Run for practice. However, very little grass got mowed, and the course would not host any of the previously scheduled home meets.

The girls team found a new, albeit temporary, home course at the Elks Lodge in Iowa City. The boys team kept their “home” meet dates, but held them on their opponents’ courses as the coaching staff decided to view each regular season dual as practice.

Despite these difficulties, the teams plugged along, doing their best to shave off strokes individually and as a team with no home course advantage over any of their opponents.

Yet both teams scored their share of successes as newer, less-experienced players stepped up, sometimes even having to replace absent starters.

Despite their smaller numbers, the boys found themselves at the halfway mark of the RVC tournament in the running for first or second. The team entered seeded sixth. When the final scores were tallied, they finished fifth, and senior Tony Rocha was named to the RVC’s First Team All-Conference list. The Bears finished fifth in the regionals, too, beating three other teams in that tournament.

And according to QuikStatsIowa.com, the boys finished the season with the third best nine-hole average and the fourth-best 18-hole average in the RVC South.

The girls moved on to the regional finals for the first time since 1998, a fact that thrilled O’Neil and the team. They missed advancing to state by only six strokes. Senior Jenae Murry finished sixth overall, just missing a chance to advance as an individual as the top five golfers move on.

As of Friday, the West Branch golf course reopened under new owners and a new name, so we have high hopes that the Bears golf teams will return to a real home course in 2017. We understand that even though the season is over, some of the individual players already lugged their clubs out to Cedars Edge Golf Course.

We can’t wait to see what they can do next year. For now, though, we’re quite pleased with what they did with this year.

Congratulations.