Peterson confident in upperclassmen
Editor’s note: The Daily Forum will be previewing every high school and college team in Nodaway County as the spring sports season approaches. This is an installment in a series that will be published over the course of the next several weeks
As the Northwest women’s golf team prepares to tee off its spring season Monday, head coach Andy Peterson knows exactly what he has after a fall slate that introduced him as the interim authority for the Bearcats.
After former head coach Pat McLaughlin announced his retirement in May 2014, Peterson took the reins for the fall season. Northwest put together its best finish of the fall with a fifth-place finish out of 12 teams in the Fort Hays State Invitational held Sept. 29 and Sept. 30.
Now that some of the butterflies have dissipated, Peterson will rely on seniors Taylor Gard and Ashley Powers. The pair of experienced players were part of the Bearcat heyday of 2010-11 and 2011-12 when the team captured five tournament victories in each season.
“The main thing was just getting the jitters out. Taylor and Ashley, as seniors, I feel put a lot of pressure on themselves, and the rest were in obviously new roles as well, most of them being new to Northwest,” Peterson said. “… Now in our second semester we can just play golf. We don’t have the distractions that we did at first. We can just go out, be confident and play. Part of it, too, was the girls adjusting to having a new coach, or getting to know the new coach, or this guy who didn’t recruit me and now he’s leading the program.
“I think there was a little disconnect there as well in the beginning. But now, as I said, we all know each other, where we fit and how we fit together, and we can go out and throw some low numbers up on the scoresheet.”
Gard and Powers also own the third and fourth-best scoring averages in program history at 84.58 and 86.13 strokes per round. With the upperclassmen, also including junior Brooke Byland, a Maryville product, set to provide predictable results, one of the final questions marks remaining will be the play of Northwest’s underclassmen.
The lack of experienced players — three upperclassmen compared to six freshmen and sophomores — is exactly why Peterson believes freshmen Maddie Propst and Gia Zupancic hold the key to the next level of success.
Propst’s best single-round finish of the fall came in the Fort Hays State Invitational when she shot a nine-over 80. Zupancic recorded the Bearcats’ fourth-best finish of the fall season with a six-over 77 in the Central Oklahoma Classic in October.
“Freshmen who will be in the mix throughout the year. They will be important because the upperclassmen are really consistent and know what it takes,” Peterson said. “I know what I’m going to get from them (the upperclassmen) usually. Gia and Maddie have the chance to put up some good scores and really help our overall team score and get us to where we want to be.”
The Bearcats begin their season Monday and Tuesday in the Diffee Ford Lincoln Invitational hosted by Southern Nazarene University in Edmond, Oklahoma.
“I was probably more lost in the fall than the girls were, and now I think we all have a much better grasp of the whole thing,” Peterson said. “I think we are ready to play well and play the best golf we’ve played all year. The biggest challenge we have is not being outside very much yet. When we are in Oklahoma, it will literally be the first time in probably a month we’ve been able to play multiple holes. Obviously that is a big challenge, but I think it feeds into us getting back into the flow, and by the time we get to the MIAA Championships at the end of April, we’ll be playing our best golf.”
