With the spring season for IU women’s golf team beginning at the end of February, the golfers need to be practicing on the green, but Bloomington’s cold winter makes that difficult.
To combat the annual weather issues IU faces in January and February, the team is taking two three-day training trips to Arizona in the coming weeks to prepare for the season ahead.
With the team’s first two tournaments of the season being in Arizona, senior Theresa-Ann Jedra said the training trips will help acclimate the players to the playing conditions, such as the dry heat and different grass, in the region.
“Playing out west helps us know how far a ball is going or how much it will roll out and different things like that,” Jedra said. “It’s also good that we get out there because a lot of the teams that we play down south or out west are playing all year round, and we’re not.”
The team will leave Thursday for its first weekend trip to Scottsdale, Arizona, where it will play at Desert Mountain Golf Course. On Feb. 10-12 the Hoosiers will return to Arizona for some practice rounds in Tucson.
IU will also play a round at Longbow Golf Club in Mesa, Arizona, before kicking off the season Feb. 26 at the Westbrook Invitational in Peoria, Arizona.
In previous years, the team has played a tournament in Puerto Rico in early February to start the spring season. However, IU Coach Clint Wallman said he wanted his golfers to get more practice rounds in than usual before beginning the season and has instead diverted the team’s funds from a Puerto Rico tournament to the Arizona trips.
“When you’re coming out of the winter, it’s always about just getting as many holes in and trying to play through stuff,” Wallman said. “When you look back historically, we start playing well when we get about a dozen rounds under our belt. The problem is in the past that has been during tournaments.”
Wallman said based on training trips in the past he expects to see round-to-round improvement from his team during its trips to Arizona.
Senior Ana Sanjuan said she will use the trips to prepare her game and focus her mind on the upcoming season. Sanjuan appeared in all 11 events for IU last year and recorded the eighth-best single-season scoring average, 75.03, in school history.
“I’m just going to try and play every shot as if it’s competition, and if I feel I have some technique problem then I have time to figure it out,” Sanjuan said. “I feel like I just want to be prepared and prepare myself as much as I can.”
Wallman said the team will play for scores while in Arizona to help add some competitive edge to the rounds. Wallman added that he will use the training trips to help determine who will travel to represent the team at future tournaments.
“They need to treat it like a tournament and they will, and that’s going to be part of what we are doing is trying to get rounds in to get back into tournament mode,” Wallman said. “It’s to get yourself prepared for when we tee it up for real in February.”
