LAKEWOOD – The season began for the Troy girls golf team with school records and five consecutive victories, but then last week all of the low scores and consistency that made the Warriors the No.1 team in the county suddenly disappeared.
“Everybody was on fire when we started off, but then we weren’t quite so good,” Troy coach Jerry Cowgill said. “We haven’t been playing our best.”
Until Monday that is. The old Warriors showed up here at Lakewood Country Club, Ysabel Tran and Beth Lillie both finished in the 30s and No. 1 Troy beat Cerritos, 203-224 on a par-37 course.
Tran once again posted the low score for the Warriors after holing a birdie on the 495-yard, par-5 ninth to finish with a 1-over-par 38. Lillie followed with a 2-over 37.
Now that Tran has switched her focus from being an Olympic figure skater to golf, she has become one the most reliable players in the lineup. She ended up in a three-way tie for first at the season-opening Rosary Royal Shotgun with a 1-over-par 36 at Western Hills Country Club and on Monday, she medaled for the fourth time this season, putting her stroke average at 1-over-par.
“Now, she is all golf. She made the cheerleading team, but she’s really just all golf,” Cowgill said. “She is doing things in golf now like playing in more tournaments that she just didn’t have time for last year when she was doing the figure skating.”
Despite the Warriors’ week-long slump, Cowgill said, he is “OK with where we are at right now.” It’s still early in the season with five weeks to go until the CIF championship season begins. While he’d like to see the Warriors in the 190s or below in every match, a 200 every now and then doesn’t necessarily bother him because he’s putting more emphasis on how the Warriors do in 18-hole tournaments, and so far Troy’s results have been very respectable.
The Warriors won the Rosary Royal Shotgun for the second year in a row, and on Friday, facing the deepest field in girls golf outside of CIF, Troy placed fifth in the Rainbow Sandals Lady Triton Invitational at San Clemente Municipal, the best showing for a county team in the tournament. On Monday, they will face No. 2 Mater Dei at the Long Beach Wilson Invitational at Recreation Park in Long Beach.
“We had never been in it before (the Triton Invitational), and we were looking forward to it. It had been a busy week for us. We had three matches before that,” Cowgill said. “But we hung in there on a course they haven’t really seen. We still came in fifth with that competition. That’s good stuff. It means that we played well and we are right there.”
