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| Kerrie Liske |
Kerrie Liske is a sophomore from Donahue, Iowa. She will share her thoughts on what it is like to be a Pioneer throughout the season.
Friday, October 16, 2009
The lady golfers of Platteville played a great final round this past Sunday at Conference. We shot 344, which was the same score we shot at our first meet, also our low for the season. Conference was held at Northern Bay Resort in Arkdale, Wisconsin. Northern Bay is a beautiful course out in the woods so it is sort of deserted, but it is also right on a lake so it’s very scenic.
The course has some replica holes on it, which were designed to look like some of the famous holes on the PGA Tour courses. For example, the start of the back 9 at Northern Bay is a replica of #17 at TPC Sawgrass, the island green. It is a challenging, yet very fun hole to play, good or bad I know each of us walked away with lots of memories from this hole. They also have replica holes of Amen Corner at Augusta-hole #12, the Church Pew bunkers at Oakmont-hole #3 and hole #16 the par three at Augusta. We play 3 rounds of 18 holes for conference so we left Friday morning and played a shotgun start at noon.
After the round we check into our condo, which was right on number 2 green. The condos are very new and are so nice. They were definitely one of the best parts about the trip! We made lasagna that we had bought for the trip and spent the night hanging out in the condo and playing cards with coach. Saturday morning we woke up to our coach cooking us breakfast and found out we were delayed an hour due to frost on the ground. We piled as many layers on as we could to try and stay warm but still needing to be able to move so we could swing. The front 9 on Saturday was freezing cold and very hard to golf. The wind was very strong and it was cloudy. On the back 9 the sun came out and it turned out to be an okay day. Unfortunately the bad weather and our scores went hand in hand, leaving us with a high team score. We showered and went to the Conference banquet and had a delicious spaghetti dinner with all the players, coaches, and families. We then went back to the condo and baked cookies and watched the Hawkeyes win!! Although I was the only one excited to see them pull out the W.
Sunday started off cold but turned out to be the best day we had, weather and golf wise. It was a beautiful day to be playing golf and we took full advantage of it. We came in with a 344, and had two players set their collegiate low scores. Tricia played an amazing round shooting 77! That was a huge help for the team and a great accomplishment for her! Overall we lucked out with the weather and had a great weekend, not to mention had a ton of fun in the condo.
We had a great season that, in my opinion went by way to fast! Our team made some great strides of improvement through out the season, and I know I really enjoyed getting to know all of the first year players better. With no graduating seniors on the team, next year looks very bright for us and we are going to work hard in the off season to prepare for an even better season next year. We are now done with meets but will spend the next 3 weeks implementing swing changes at practice and working to improve our game. In the off-season we will do some fundraising and then start hitting in the nets inside to prepare for the spring season.
I would like to thank everyone for following our team this season, either personally coming to watch our meets, or by following this blog, or following our scores over the Internet. We all appreciate the support and it has been my pleasure being able to update this blog and hopefully help inform our fans and followers on our season. Thank you once again and have a great year, I will pick this back up in spring season! God bless.
This last weekend was a busy one for the Pioneer golf team. We had a meet at Whitewater on Friday, and then hosted our invitational Saturday and Sunday at the Platteville Country Club. Overall it turned out to be a good weekend for us. Somehow we managed to dodge the rain Friday and Saturday and had some great weather to play in.
We ended up playing pretty good at the Whitewater meet. We played Riverside Golf Course, which is fairly easy to score on, so there were some very low scores from individuals. Our team shot 354, which was our second lowest round of the season thus far. As players were finishing getting in we were huddled around the scoring board counting up scores, anxious to see what place we took. Carroll University, who had beaten us the last two tournaments, has been one of our very close competitors throughout the season. We ended up beating Carroll by 1 stroke, placing us in 2nd, which we received a plaque for, so we were very excited about that. Also Kellsey Welter shot 80 that day and took 2nd place, so we were excited about that as well.
Having a home meet is always an advantage for a golf team. You know the course better than any other team and you get to practice on it the most. We took full advantage of this opportunity at Platteville Country Club Saturday. We shot 353, one stroke lower than the day before and led the meet by 2 strokes going into Sunday. Our home course is one of the more difficult golf courses in the conference. 
We heard many players, coaches, and parents talk about how difficult it was because of the small fast greens, and the narrow fairways, not to mention a workout in itself just walking the hilly course. The course got the best of a lot of players this weekend, and the scores reflected that from many teams, being much higher than any other meet. Sunday Whitewater made up a ton of ground and ended up taking first place. We all turned in our cards Sunday with higher scores, which led to a team score of 369 and gave us third place. We were a little disappointed with third because we all could have played much better, and it’s never fun to give up a lead. Overall the team had a successful weekend and we had great weather for playing 54 holes of golf.
I would like to thank everyone who came out and supported us this weekend at our home meet. It really means a lot to have our family, friends, and faculty there to watch and support us as we play. Thank you again and have a great week!
Well we successfully made it through our first golf meet of the season. September 5th and 6th we traveled to Eau Claire to kick off our season. In college golf meets, you can play 5 girls and the 4 lowest scores count for the team score. This meet was 4 of our 6 players’ first collegiate tournament. So once everyone (including the veterans) got the nerves out of their systems, we ended up shooting extremely well. We played Mill Run the first day, which is a relatively easy course. It is very flat, not many trees or hazards and doesn’t play very long. Our team score was 344, which was lower than we were all season last year. It was a great way to start off the season.
The neat thing about the Eau Claire tournament is we get the opportunity to play 2 different courses over the weekend. All other meets you just play the same course twice. The 2nd day we teed off at Wild Ridge at 7:30 am. We were at the course to see the sun rise, which was neat, but still very early! Everyone shot much higher scores, but the course was much more difficult. At the end of the day we took 14th out of 21 teams, we fell back a few places from Saturday. We stopped for dinner and made the 4 hour trek back, arriving late Sunday night, making Labor Day and being able to sleep in very appreciated.
We spent this past weekend in Oshkosh for their invite. We left Friday night after practice because it was a shotgun start at 8:30 Saturday morning. No one from our team had ever played the course (Oshkosh Country Club) before so we went into Saturday completely blind. We played so-so; the course was very old so there were lots of big trees that caused a lot of trouble for many. Also the greens were very hard and fast, so putting took a while to get down for some of us. We played a quick 4½ hour round so we had the afternoon to practice, do homework and just spend time relaxing. One of our players, Helen Wilson, lives 15 minutes from the course so we were invited for dinner at her house Saturday night for some delicious home cooked food, and got to see Helen’s musical talents for our evening’s entertainment. Plus it was nice to get out of our not so great hotel. Sunday we teed off at 8:30 again and ended up shooting 3 strokes worse than Saturday. No one played that well, so everyone was pretty disappointed with the day. Out of the 8 teams there we placed 4th.
We have next weekend off so we have lots of time to prepare for Whitewater’s invite, and our own meet the weekend of the 25th. We will spend this next week and a half practicing hard to prepare for our upcoming events. Have a great day!
Hello, my name is Kerrie Liske, and I am a sophomore this year at UWP. I am from Donahue, Iowa and am majoring in Health Promotions. This is my second season as a Pioneer golfer. I will be updating this blog regularly to inform others how our meets, road trips and season are going.
We reported to campus on the 23rd of August. We were allowed to move into our permanent dorms, which is very convenient only have to unpack once. Campus has been practically empty this last week with only a few teams and organizations present and each have long days of practices and meetings. We had golf camp each day from 10 am to about 5:30 pm. We would spend a few hours each day practicing on the range and putting green, have a lunch break, and then play 18 holes. If anyone has played our home course, you will know just how long and hilly it is, so we were always pretty tired from walking the course each day. We have five new faces to the team, which adds a lot of depth to our roster. I enjoyed getting to know all of the new players through out the week.
Friday the entire team took a day trip to Janesville, WI to play a practice round at Riverside Golf Course, which is Whitewater’s new home course. It rained for the first few holes we played then turned out to be a perfect day for golf. The course was fairly wet so the greens were slow and a lot of sand traps had standing water which a few girls lost golf balls in throughout the round. Compared to Platteville C.C. the course was relatively flat and the trees were not to thick, so everyone scored much lower than they had throughout the week at Platteville. On our way home we stopped in Madison and had dinner at Cheeseburger in Paradise, which was a lot of fun. Sunday we had the UWP Alumni Golf Outing at our course. Five alumni came back and we played a 9-hole scramble. It was fun to play with the alumni again, and afterwards we went to coach’s house to get some good home-cooked food, which is always a nice break from the cafeteria food. We have a busy week ahead of us as we prepare for the Eau Claire Invite this Saturday and Sunday. I will keep everyone updating on how our first meet goes!