Women’s golf shows improvement at Westminster

The Waynesburg women’s golf team is continuing to build its program both on and off the  course, as the fall portion of the season winds down for the Yellow Jackets. With just one invitational left before the Presidents’ Athletic Conference Fall golf championships Oct. 7-8, head coach Sam Jones wants his team to be more consistent across the board.

 

This past weekend, the women finished last out of seven teams at the Westminster Invitational. Jones believes that despite the outcome, the team is moving in the right direction and has shown signs of improvement over the past few matches.

 

“Saturday was another good day, we continued to improve,” Jones said. “[Deanna] Nagel had a really good day, she’s getting better and had a much better day than she had two weeks ago, so that was great to see that improvement.”

 

Nagel, a junior, led the way for Waynesburg shooting a 108. Jones also spoke highly of improvements made by freshman Allie Delaney and sophomore Sam Pero who finished second and third for the Jackets, shooting 114 and 137, respectively.

 

“Pero and Delaney are consistently staying with decent numbers and improving from where they started, which is great,” Jones said. “We’re not ready to challenge for a conference championship, but we’re going to be much improved from where we were last year.”

 

Sophomores Patience Yopb and Amanda Bruni rounded out the scoring for Waynesburg.

 

Freshman Erika Hoover of Westminster took home first shooting a career-low 74 (+2) at New Castle Country Club. In team scoring, the College of Wooster finished first at the invitational, shooting at combined 327 on the day. That score was enough to beat out Westminster and Malone University, who tied for second, by 14 strokes.

 

One of the largest areas for growth , Jones said, is consistency. He has seen the team become more consistent this year in numbers, but now he hopes for that to start to correlate to consistency in the scoring.

 

“Having consistency is the key, we’ve some returners who golfed last year and then some of our newer players are maybe new to golf, but they’re athletes in other sports so bringing that athlete mentality and some constancy to their approach has really helped us grow,” Jones said.

 

Moving into the final two matches of the fall, Jones said the women will need to work on putting, and said if they do so, there is a chance they could finish ahead of Geneva at the PAC Championships. ]

 

“Continuing to build on being more consistent, so we don’t have large fluctuation in numbers [will be key],” Jones said. “[Also], putting, we could cut a lot of strokes off if we got a little more consistent with our putting. That’s going to be a focus of ours between now and PACs.”

 

The women’s golf team will travel to Glengarry Golf Links in Latrobe at 11:30 a.m. this Wednesday for the St. Vincent College Invitational, before beginning preparations for the conference tournament, which will be played Oct. 7-8 in Vienna, Ohio.