W. Golf heads east to Princeton Invite

The Penn women's golf team fared as expected, rather than as hoped, last weekend in New Haven, Conn. Penn's women's golfers placed 19th in a 22-team field at the Yale Invitational in their inaugural tournament as a varsity team. The home team captured the title with a two round score of 633, 73 over par, while Penn finished with a score of 857, 297 over par and 224 strokes behind the winners. Yet the Penn golfers were not at all upset. The Quakers still remember last year when the club team didn't have matching uniforms and equipment bags, much less their own tournaments. The Red and Blue shot over 900 in the Ivy League Championship last spring. All that is different now. "We've already improved," Penn captain Natasha Miller said. "Yale is a very challenging course and we played as well as we could." Penn had never participated in the event before. Miller admitted that Yale's was one of the toughest courses the team had seen, replete with deep bunkers and a deadly par-three hole in which 140 of the 160 yards are over water. "It's long and hilly," sophomore Victoria Entine said. "Besides just playing golf, we're hiking." In addition, only four Penn golfers made the trip to Yale, meaning that all of their scores had to count. The other schools had five representatives, allowing them to omit their lowest score from the final tally. Despite this shorthandedness and the adverse terrain, freshman standout Stacy Kress posted the highest Penn score, finishing in a tie for 36th in the tournament. "She had her head together and went out there knowing what she wanted to accomplish," Miller said. Even though the team placed towards the bottom of the bracket, it did finish about 60 strokes better than it did in the Ivy League Championship a year ago and team members intend to continue improving in the future. Though a long term project, Penn's immediate challenge will take place in Princeton, N.J., this weekend for the Princeton Invitational. Miller and her teammates are excited about playing on a course that is not only more familiar, but more forgiving. The senior explained that the massive greens at Yale caused short-game problems for the women who were not accustomed to attempting long putts -- sometimes from as far out as 40 feet -- on any other course. Although Princeton promises to be an easier task than Yale and the players expect to further improve their game, the Quakers are quick to point out that new golfers are always welcome. Coach Francis Vaughn began to recruit women's players for Penn a couple years ago and the process has proven very rewarding as a record number of high school seniors have already expressed interest in next year's squad. Junior Jen Schraut, who scored second best after Kress among the Quakers in the Yale tournament, explained a big role that women golfers have at Penn . "We are helping develop a program that will hopefully be around for a long time," she said.

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