Women's Golf Ready For Maiden NCAA Regional Voyage
5/8/2013 12:00:00 AM | Women's Golf
Central Regional Tournament Central
SPOKANE, Wash. - Gonzaga University's women's golf team makes its maiden voyage into unchartered waters this week with its inaugural appearance in the NCAA Regional.
The Bulldogs were somewhat surprisingly sent to the Central Regional in Norman, Okla., and will join 23 other teams and six individuals at the Jimmie Austin OU Golf Club on the University of Oklahoma campus. The course will play to 6,298-yards at par 72. Gonzaga will tee off at 10 a.m. PDT Thursday and 5:30 a.m. PDT Friday. Saturday's final-round pairings will be determined by the standings at the completion of Friday's second round.
In all, three regions of 24 teams and six individuals each will be staged Thursday through Saturday. The West Regional, where the Bulldogs figured they would be sent, will be played at Stanford University with the East Regional hosted by Auburn University in Auburn, Ala. The top eight teams and the top two individuals who are not part of the top eight teams from each regional will advance to the NCAA Championship May 21-24 in Athens, Ga.
The Bulldogs have been ramping up their preparation.
"We've started kicking our practice into full throttle again. We're still working hard on making sure everybody is going to be done with school before we leave so people have to take a minimal amount of finals on the road," Gonzaga head coach Brad Rickel said.
Rickel and the team are also learning a little bit about the course prior to their arrival late Tuesday night in Norman.
"I've researched the golf course a little bit, sent a few e-mails to my team telling them to check this website, or check that website out so they are starting to learn a little bit about the course. We're just trying to crank everything up to 100 percent," Rickel said.
Rickel's first impression of the layout is it's a fair course.
"I think it's probably going to be a Bermuda type of grass. We think it will be windy. It looks like it's a fair golf course off the tee but tightens up around the greens. We can only see so much, but it looks like a great golf course," Rickel said. "To me it looks like it has some room off the tee, then it looks to me like you have to be a little better if you want to be in the right spot around the green, which we work on all the time. It looks like it's surrounded by stuff you can't hit your golf ball into. But it looks like it gives you a reasonable amount of room to play golf."
Three of the Top 10 teams in the country and five of the Top 12 teams are in the Norman field, but one thing caught Rickel's eye immediately.
"The one thing I latched on to immediately is we're playing Texas Tech which is the seventh seed and we beat them a month ago. We obviously played really good and they probably feel they didn't play that good that week, but we know eight teams advance. We're not playing against those eight teams as much as we are playing against the golf course. We do know one of the top eight seeds is somebody we faced and beat, so it's possible and that's all we need is the ability to think it is possible."
Gonzaga and Texas Tech were in the field at the Challenge at Onion Creek in Austin, Texas, in early April. The Zags won the tournament with a 54-hole score of 862 while the Red Raisers finished fourth 10 strokes behind Gonzaga.
Rickel will be coaching his eighth team in the NCAA Regional, having taken seven teams to regional when he was the head coach of both the University of Idaho's men's and women's squads. He thinks this year's Bulldogs are the most talented team he has taken to a regional.
"I once had a 10 seed and was ranked 30th in the country. I think they won four or five tournaments that year. This team is pretty comparable to that team," Rickel said of the 16th-seeded and 46th-ranked Bulldogs. "I don't know if I ever had a team finish in the top three nine times in 10 tournaments. They believe in themselves, they believe in each other. I think this is as good a team as I've ever had; as talented as I've ever had."
The line-up this week will be the same as it was for the West Coast Conference Championship where the Bulldogs finished second for the second time in three years. That means senior Victoria Fallgren will play No. 1, freshman Raychelle Santos will play No. 2, sophomore Alice Kim will be at No. 3, sophomore Han Wu will be at No. 4 and senior Genavive 'Genna' Dodge will play No. 5.
Fallgren, Santos, Kim and Wu each finished in the Top 10 at the WCC Championship and earned All-WCC accolades. But Rickel knows his squad will have to play its best golf of the season to advance past this weekend.
Santos, who won two tournaments this season, finished second in the WCC Championship, two strokes off the lead. Fallgren, who took WCC medalist honors in 2011, was sixth in the WCC Championship this season. Kim, who won once this spring, was tied for seventh in the conference championship. Wu, another one-time winner, was ninth in the WCC chase.
"If we play our best golf we'll be in it the final day. I want to get to the final round of the tournament with a chance to play ourselves to the national championship round. If we play our best that's possible," Rickel said.
Rickel said part of the preparation for this week was getting a break from golf and concentrating on school with finals beginning this past Monday.
"A big part of getting ready for this was to have a little bit of a break and to get caught up in school. Golf is a very mental game, an emotional game if we have too much of that weighing on us," Rickel said. "We have to make sure we dial it back in for the next few days and have a great practice round. Our confidence level is good. Our confidence lies in the fact we play believe we can play a golf course correctly."
