Gritty group from Wyoming builds big opening cushion at Women’s National Golf Invitational
· Yahoo Sports
Play college golf in Wyoming, and resilience is just a part of the job description. Josey Stender’s squad didn’t even get on grass until last month. Injury has plagued several players but despite those setbacks, Stender has a full squad at the National Golf Invitational this week.
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“They amaze me because of what they have been through physically to still continue to show up and weather the storm,” Stender said after her team rose to the top of the leaderboard in the first round of the NGI. “I think every coach goes through years where you’re battling some injuries and setbacks, but this team just didn’t ever let it become an obstacle.”
This, as Stender said, is the Wyoming Way. Hers is a gritty, resourceful bunch who can figure out how to take a winter of indoor practice and physical therapy and parlay it into a nine-shot first-round lead in the postseason. Wyoming, with its 1-under 287 at Ak-Chin Southern Dunes in Maricopa, Arizona, built an immediate nine-shot cushion on Friday.
Bradley and defending NGI champion Rutgers both had team scores of 8 over.
Wyoming may be a cold-weather team, but the Cowgirls have found a dessert home at Southern Dunes. For the past several seasons, both the men’s and women’s teams have hosted events at the course in early April.
Stender said familiarity with the golf course played a big role in her team’s confident start.
“They’re very comfortable on this golf course and I think a lot of it has to do with the sense of pride and the real ownership they have,” she said. “It’s our home away from home so while the course setup was a little bit different than how we play it, I think that they took advantage of knowing where not to miss and with our length, we knew we could take advantage of the par 5s and some of the shorter par 4s.”
Wyoming led the field in par-5 scoring, going 6 under on those holes (outscoring Bradley by four shots) and also had the most birdies (17) of any of the 10 teams in the field.
Stender, in two decades leading Wyoming, had never taken a team to the postseason before. The NGI went onto the team’s list of core goals in the fall and Stender told her players that if they continued to chip away at it and take advantage of key events on the schedule where she knew the team could perform well, the NGI was within reach.
“I think our spring, especially late spring, we started playing up to our potential,” she said.
After finishing fourth as a team at the Mountain West Conference Championship, the chatter went up a level. Freshman Kiley Reisner was on the bubble for an at-large bid into NCAA Regionals as an individual and Meghan Vogt had already been accepted into the PGA Works National Championship.
When the NGI invitation came through, Stender’s first call went to Vogt. A player can only compete in one postseason event in a season.
“She thought about it a little bit and called me literally within an hour and said nope, I want to play with the team,” Stender said. “We have one more left in us.
“That put the cherry on top. I told everyone else and they were so excited.”
Wyoming’s men have competed in the NGI two of the past three years (the Cowboys were runner-up in the inaugural event) and are in the field again next week. Stender and head men’s coach Joe Jensen have a close coaching relationship – Stender looks at Jensen as a mentor and big brother.
Jensen was all in when it came to Stender taking a team to the NGI – no matter the circumstances, no matter what players may or may not be in the lineup.
“The experience your team is going to get to continue to play, continue to practice, build on the things we’ve been focusing on all year is just such a springboard to their summer, to next year,” Stender said in relaying Jensen’s advice. “He was definitely all in. I always told him … that I never wanted to play in the event unless I knew we could be competitive and I knew this was our year.”
After the first round, Wyoming has three players (Reisner, Elle Higgins and Vogt) inside the top seven individually. Reisner posted 3-under 69 for the individual lead.
Stender calls her freshman “a competitor to the core,” and a player whose prodigious length off the tee sets her up well to score, particularly at Southern Dunes. She credits Reisner with stepping up her wedge game in her first season to take her game to the next level.
Reisner, who won twice and finished in the top 10 six times in 10 stroke-play starts this season, had the flu the first tournament of the fall, but gutted out 36 holes on a 100-degree day anyway and tied for 10th that week. Stender still remembers it – the ultimate example of what this team is about.
Don’t ever count out a player from Wyoming.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Gritty group from Wyoming builds big opening cushion at Women’s NGI