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Women’s Golf Team To Play in Bryan National Collegiate 3-30-04 3/30/2004 Fresh from its third team championship of the year, Coach Martha Freitag will take her Commodores to the Bryan National Collegiate in Browns Summit, N.C., an event that has agreed with Vanderbilt in the recent past. Last season, for instance, Vanderbilt placed second as a team and May Wood was co-medalist. In 2000, with the program still building, the team finished fourth. “The Bryan National Champions Course set-up is one that we seem to like,” Freitag says. “It’s very playable — that does not mean it is easy — but if you manage yourself well you can score. Our kids like that kind of course.” Vanderbilt, rated fifth by golfweek.com, is one of six Top 10 teams in the strong field. The Commodores join hosts Wake Forest (17) and UNC-Greensboro and 15 others including Auburn (4), Duke (1), Florida, Furman, Georgia (10), Louisville, North Carolina, N.C. State, Ohio State (6), Oklahoma State (9), Purdue, South Carolina, Tennessee, Tulane and Virginia. Vanderbilt has already captured team championships at the Kentucky Wildcat Invitational, the Arizona Wildcat Invitational and two weeks ago took the title at the Betsy Rawls Longhorn Invitational. The three wins are a school record for a single season. The Commodores will have their usual quintet of seniors Sarah Jacobs and Courtney Wood, sophomore May Wood and freshmen Kristen Svicarovich and Chris Brady on hand. Coach Freitag has seemed to have a different leader for every tournament. Freshman Chris Brady, who had struggled at times this spring, won the Texas tournament by leading wire-to-wire. Brady had been the co-medalist at the Kentucky Wildcat tournament last fall and is the first Commodore to win twice in a single season. Sophomore May Wood won in Arizona while freshman Kristen Svicarovich, while not winning, had the team’s best performance at the Lady Gator in early March. The two Vanderbilt seniors have also enjoyed their moments. Sarah Jacobs is averaging 74.9 in 21 tournament rounds, just .3 higher than May Wood’s team leading average. Jacobs is the highest ranked VU individual by GolfWeek at No. 19 while May Wood is 23rd. Classmate Courtney Wood won the LPGA Futures Qualifier last November and despite some struggling is still ranked among the nation’s top 50 individuals. “When you have a team with five strong players,” Freitag says, “some weeks are simply going to be better than others. That’s the nature of college golf. Right now, for example, Chris Brady has worked very hard on her game and she feels comfortable on the course. She has a good mindset and that helped her in Texas. But we have a team in which any player can break out at any moment.” Top rated Duke will be the favorite in the tournament and the Blue Devils are the defending Bryan National champions, last year shooting 580 in the rain-shortened 36-hole event. Freitag notes that Duke has five players ranked individually in the nation’s top 11, making the Blue Devils difficult to beat. Ohio State is likely to offer another top challenge but with so many highly rated teams anything can happen. “Our goal is to put ourselves in a position to win,” Freitag says. “We’re not going to go there hoping to finish second. It wouldn’t be easy but it is possible for us to win in this very tough field.” The practice round will be played Thursday with 18 holes played Friday through Sunday over the 6,044 yard, par 72 layout. Fans unable to attend can follow live scoring on golfstat.com. |
