The Spartans snagged their ninth straight win Monday, protecting their perfect season record and holding fast to the top spot in the Metro League.
Defeating the visitors from Garfield High 119-84 at Wing Point Golf & Country Club Monday, Oct. 9, the Bainbridge High varsity girls golf team advanced their flawless streak to 9-0.
Second place is held by Roosevelt (8-2 overall), who the Spartan then traveled to play against Wednesday, their final match of the regular season.
Monday’s match was a beautiful performance on a beautiful day, sunny and windless — much to Head Coach Ian Havill’s chagrin.
“I was kind of hoping for some rain,” he said.
“It’s not uncommon for it to be raining at the Metro tournament. We haven’t had a lot of rain this year,” he said. “I always feel like we have an advantage if it’s bad conditions, because we talk about staying focused and realizing you’re not going to maybe shoot the same score that you would on a sunny, 73 [degree] day when the ball is flying further and so on.”
It’s not unusual in golf, the coach said, for people to get down on themselves and “give up for periods of time, even multiple holes or even the rest of the day” under such conditions.
“Our guys, not that they’re perfect, but you try and instill in them [that] we may have an advantage here, if we keep grinding it out and make a six when, if we lost interest a little bit, we make a nine on a terrible, rainy, tough hole,” he said.
Well, Havill didn’t get his rain, but he did get a great performance from the girls.
Spartan superstar Kendall Havill led the charge against Garfield, scoring a 35 and notching 37 points for the island team. No other player on either team shot below a 40.
Bainbridge powerhouse Lucy Hanacek was the second scoriest Spartan, finishing the match with 44 (28 points). Both Madison Culp and Maddie Loverich shot 45 (27 points), Anna Kozlosky and Sara Colley shot 49 (23 points), and Caitlin Slattery shot 53 (19 points).
It was, Havill said, a great afternoon all around for the Spartans — perhaps their best yet of the year. The team seemed to be peaking at the right time.
“We’re a little better than the averages,” he said, as the team’s less-than-stellar early showings are factored into those metrics. The squad rose up from that remarkably mediocre tryout session — the worst, the coach said, in eight years — to their present flawless state, making their actual improvement difficult to measure.
“They’re playing well,” Havill said.
“I think we should be in the top, between first, second, third [in Metro], based on the way we’re scoring. But there’s some good teams. Seattle Prep is good, and Roosevelt is good. That’s no cinch win. We’ll probably be the underdog on Wednesday.”
The slated match against Nathan Hale, originally scheduled for Friday, Oct. 13, was canceled due to the other team’s low number of players, meaning the outing against Roosevelt would cap the Spartans’ regular season.
