When collegiate golfers talk about the difficulty of playing Yale's formidable course, they describe it as daunting, unbelievably hard or extremely difficult.
This past weekend the Big Green women found out that their peers weren't kidding around as they earned a hard-fought sixth place finish at the Yale Fall Invitational in New Haven Connecticut.
The first hole is played over something that could almost be described as a quarry. The next two are long and challenging, with the second over a large sand trap and ravine and the third over a small lake. And those three aren't even the tough ones. The ninth and eighteenth holes are referred to as the "famous Yale holes" by those who have played the course before.
To have previously played the course is really the only way to be successful at Yale, and the second day improvement of the Dartmouth scores are evidence of that.
As a team, the Big Green shot 368 on Saturday and a much improved 353 on Sunday for a total of 721. Rutgers was the first place finisher (334-341) with 675 in a two stroke upset over Princeton (330-347--677).
Sara Vogler '96 shot consistently (88-89) to finish with a team-leading 177. Samantha Sommers '99 (97-86) finished behind Vogler with 183, followed by Meredith Johnson '98 (96-90) who had 186.
Captain Heidi Corderman '96 and Jessica Hughes '97 both shot 188. Hughes ran into difficulty on the first hole Saturday when she sprained her ankle, making footwork tough for the rest of the competition.
Dartmouth's 353 on Sunday tied the Big Green with the University of Hartford for the fourth best score on Sunday and put them ahead of most of the rest of the pack, including Long Beach State, Calif. and South Carolina's Waford College.
"We were very pleased with that," Coach Izzy Johnson said. She noted that the improvement was due to experience. "Our putting improved, and I think we had better course management. The more you play it, the more you become accustomed to it."
As it did last weekend at the Dartmouth Invitational, the short game played a big part at Yale, too.
"The greens are huge and roly-poly," Johnson said. "Chipping and putting becomes a real factor there."
As a freshman, Sommers had never played the course before, yet she fared well on Sunday, shooting the team's lowest round of the weekend. She attributes her improvement to capitalization on knowledge gained through Saturday's mistakes and better putting.
"It's a really tough course and there's a lot of blind shots that you have to hit, Sommers said. "It's easier to adjust [on the second round] if you've played a round prior to that."
"Compared to last year, we did a lot better," Corderman said. "We were pleased. It is a very hard course. Most of the other team's scores went up the second day. Pretty much everyone [from Dartmouth] played better the second day."
Superficially, the team's scores at Yale may not look much better than those at the Dartmouth Tournament, but they are. New to golf in the past few years is a slope rating assigned to each course, along with the par.
According to Johnson, Yale has a rating of about 145. Average is 113. Comparatively, the course at the Hanover Country Club is six or seven shots easier than Yale's.
When approached from that angle, some of the individual scores from Yale are much more impressive than the scores the Big Green golfers earned last weekend at home in the Dartmouth Invitational.
The women have next weekend off, giving them extra time to prepare for the tournament at Mount Holyoke in two weeks.
