Women’s Golf Falters in Opener

The rust of a long offseason can take quite a while to shake off, as the Harvard women’s golf team realized at this weekend’s Princeton Invitational.

Shooting a 54-hole team total of 920, the Crimson finished sixth out of 12 squads at the two-day tournament, held at Springdale Golf Club in Princeton, N.J beginning Saturday.

“It’s obviously quite a disappointing start to the season,” Harvard coach Kevin Rhoads said. “It is just one tournament; it’s the first tournament of the year.”

“There’s a lot of things to be sorted out, and it’s a long year, but certainly we would have liked to have put forth a stronger result in relation to the other teams,” he added.

Accumulating a three-round score of 896, Yale took first in the team competition, followed by Princeton and reigning Ivy champion Penn, which turned in scores of 899 and 907, respectively.

Rounding out the top five were Georgetown and Rollins College, the champion of last year’s tournament. Seventh-place Columbia was the only league representative to finish behind the Crimson, which had finished second at the event in 2009.

The strong play of each of the Ivy squads may signal a general trend of improvement in the Ancient Eight.

“One thing that’s very clear is that the league has gotten a lot stronger,” Rhoads said. “What we shot this year, in other years, probably would have been good enough for first, or second, or third, at the very least, and this year it was good enough for sixth.”

“What was good enough is not good enough anymore,” he added. “It’s a good wake-up call for us.”

The only golfer in the field to end up below par on the 6,108-yard, par-72 course, Bulldog freshman Seo Hee Moon took home the top individual prize, firing a three-under 213.

Harvard’s best finisher was freshman Bonnie Hu, who tied for fourth overall with a six-over 222.

The highly-touted rookie—ranked ninth in her class by the National Junior Scoreboard—had her best performance in the second round, when she started out hot to reach four-under early and ended up with a two-under 70.

“I was just making a lot of putts and getting up and down a lot,” Hu said. “I didn’t actually hit that many greens, but I kept making pars...and actually quite a few birdies.”

“She has no real weaknesses in her game,” Rhoads added. “She hits it far, she hits it straight. She chips well, and she putts very well.”

Junior Christine Cho contributed Harvard’s second-best score of the weekend, as her nine-over 225 was good for a tie for 10th place.

Cho, the reigning Ivy League Player of the Year, recovered from a first-round 79 to fire a pair of 73s.

“She had an illness at the beginning of the summer where she lost a bunch of weight and some strength, so she’s trying to get her distance back,” Rhoads noted.

Each of the Crimson golfers had her lowest-scoring round in her second time around the course.

“I was certainly proud of how they bounced back after quite an uncharacteristically high first round,” Rhoads said. “They did okay in the third round.”

Next up was rookie Fritzie Reuter, whose total of 237 put her in a tie for 32nd, and just one stroke behind was captain Mia Kabasakalis, who tied for 35th.

The team’s only senior, Kabasakalis agreed with her coach’s assessment of the squad’s difficulties in returning from a long and busy summer.

“We are maybe a little bit rustier than we were last year, and a little bit less prepared, and everybody else in the league played better than last year,” she said. “That set us back a lot, and so I think we need to use this as motivation...we can do better.”

Sophomore Katie Sylvan, the league’s top rookie last season, was the final Harvard finisher of the weekend, as she tied for 47th.

The Crimson now must regroup and prepare for next week’s Golfweek Conference Challenge in Vail, Colo., where it will come up against what is likely the strongest field it will face all year.

At last year’s competition the squad placed an impressive seventh out of 18 of the nation’s top teams, but it appears that Harvard will now need to make up some ground on teams within its own conference.

“It’s an unfamiliar territory for the team, but it’ll be good for them, to see how they respond,” Rhoads said.

—Staff writer Dennis J. Zheng can be reached at dzheng12@college.harvard.edu.