Looking beyond the green
With Team New Mexico all but eliminated, players already talking about lives beyond soggy tournament
There is a stretch along the back nine of the sweeping golf course at Las Campanas where a long dirt path leads from one putting green to an elevated tee box not far away.
That path was saturated with a morning’s worth of soft rain Wednesday, the kind of rain that slowly seeps into Northern New Mexico’s high-desert landscape and turns compacted sand into a muddy mess that invites slips and slides.
It was along that path that Santa Fe’s Chanet Fiorina-Trujillo found her groove during the second round of the USGA Women’s State Team Championship, a three-day tournament that features threeplayer teams from 47 states and the District of Columbia.
“I may not have had the scores I wanted, but I did finish strong and, really, at the end of the day, I get to go home to a roof, a warm bed and food,” Fiorina-Trujillo said. “Golf is important but it’s not my entire life. I love it, but I have so much more going on, things I’m grateful for.”
Fiorina-Trujillo and the rest of Team New Mexico will likely miss the cut, but the tournament will go on, weather permitting. The event has been dominated by a handful of players who have come in under par but the real story is (and will be again) the weather. Tuesday’s blustery conditions gave way to wind and rain by the end of Round 1. Wednesday’s play was all that and then some.
Play was halted in the early afternoon and then finally suspended at 6:22 p.m. with 33 players still on the course. It created a log jam on the scoreboard, which saw New York on top of the team standings with a one-stroke lead over Florida and Tennessee, and by Indiana’s Julia Potter on the individual side.
A former college golfer at Missouri who now resides in South Bend, Ind., Potter carded her second straight 2-under 70 to claim sole possession of the lead at 4-under 140. She overtook Riley Rennell of Tennessee for the top spot.
Rennell struggled to a secondround 77, three-putting the final green en route to a double bogey. She slipped all the way to ninth at 1-over 145.
Arizona’s Ashley Menne is sec-
ond at 3-under, 141. She was one of 11 players to break par before the rains came. Of those, seven cracked 70. That includes the low round of the day from Tennessee’s Ashley Gilliam. The 16-year-old blistered the course with a 5-under 67, shaving 11 shots off her opening round total.
She had seven birdies and two bogeys, at one point posting five straight birds to shoot up the leaderboard. She is one of more than a dozen high school players in the tournament. That includes Jacquelyn Galloway from Rio Rancho and, of course, the celebrity of this year’s event, Alexa Pano out of Florida.
The 13-year-old Pano is a world champion and movie star. She was a focus in the 2013 film The Short Game, produced by Justin Timberlake, a documentary made a few years after Pano won her first world title at the ripe old age of 6. It’s practically required viewing on Netflix for a young generation of golfers.
She is currently tied for 16th, six shots off the pace.
New York’s trio managed to beat most of the bad weather, but there are five other teams within five strokes. To calculate a team score, the top two players are taken from each round and added together. The third’s score is only used in case of a tiebreaker.
Wednesday’s suspended round will be played Thursday morning, followed (weather permitting) by the final round. The forecast calls for a 90-percent chance of rain Thursday morning with a high temperature in the upper 50s.
New Mexico is all but out of the picture. With a team total that left it in a tie for 25th, Team N.M. was four shots shy of the cut line reserved for the top 21 teams. For Galloway that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
A high school junior, she said she’s got some school work to catch up on.
“I missed four quizzes the last two days,” she said. “I don’t really think about that stuff when I’m out here but now that it kind of looks like we might be done I need to get my mind on it.”
Galloway was steady on Wednesday, checking in with three birdies and going the final 11 holes at 2-under. She needed to be within five shots of the overall leader to keep a spot in the individual tournament, but she was nine shots off the pace when play stopped.
The end of the round saw Fiorina-Trujillo playing at her best. She walked off the course on a hot streak with six pars and a birdie on the soggy back nine. She holed out from the bunker on the par-3 16th as the rain came down, then saved par on the next hole by putting up from the fringe and making a challenging 10-foot putt to avoid a bogey.
“I started off with a mental block and those are always hard to get through, but once I started swinging the club and remembering what this is about and that it’s not a matter of life and death I started playing much better,” she said. “It’s amazing how that happens.”