April 21-22, 2008

Hello faithful readers, 

This week we are headed down to Salt Lake City. This is my final Frontier Conference Tournament of my life. It’s kind of a strange feeling. I just hope that we are able to play seeing as though the weather report says snow and wind. It’s sometimes strange to travel down to the Crossroad of the West seeing as we only are able to take five girls and five guys. It is nice to fly instead of having a 12 hour road trip but it’s never fun to leave teammates and friends behind.

We got into Salt Lake on Sunday morning and headed straight to the golf course for a practice round. The wind however kept us off the golf course, we didn’t want to get worn out for our 36 hole round. Instead we headed back to the hotel to rest up for the following day.

To our amazement on Monday it was actually a nice day. A few times the wind picked up but other than the wind we just had to worry about getting sun burnt. We play Wingpointe a golf course that lies right under the take-off and landing runways of the Salt Lake Airport. The course is flat, there are no trees, and sand on every hole. To score well here we knew as a team that hitting greens in regulation was key. I started off the day on hole number 13, lucky huh? My start wasn’t horrible but it also wasn’t fantastic. Throughout the first few holes I decided to play the Rocky player instead of the course. This is never a good idea because pressing only put added stress onto the game. On hole one I settled down and ended up shooting 41-41 for an 82. After the first round we were tied with Rocky and knew we needed to step up our game.

Not surprisingly I started off poorly on the second 18 of the day. I was very worried about scoring that I made foolish mistakes. On hole one I cleared my mind and started my round over mentally, I had a string of three pars, a bogey, two pars, a bogey, a par, and ended hole nine with a bogey. For a 39. The back however really seemed to get to me and I ended up with a 44, making my total of 83 for the second round. A few bad holes really hurt my round. As a team we were one down to Rocky.

As a team we were excited for the final day. The sun was out when we woke and it felt ten degrees warmer than the previous morning. When we finally all got to our hole, however, it was surprising how much frost was on the course. The greens were fine but the fairways and rough were frost covered. Well to make a long story short we all played well. The LC girls came in with good scores but sadly the Rocky girls played fantastically. At first we were bummed to have lost but as we put it into perspective we were happy with our overall team score.   

Next week we all head up to Coeur d’ Alene for our regional tournament. We are very excited. This tournament will be the last time I ever have to walk thirty-six holes and well that’s the sweet part. The bitter part of the tournament is that after next week I will just have Nationals left on my Warrior Golf schedule.  

I will write again as soon as we play. Again pray to the golfing Gods for good weather, it helped in Salt Lake. Good things will come from this team, I guarantee it. 

Samara (aka Shooter, aka Cheddar, aka la capitana) Kluever