Your Turn To Swing

Golfers encourage more people to join the sport, cite excitement of the game

The girls’ golf team advances to Region on April 17 after competing in District, with junior Riley Shearn earning a medal. Junior Andrew Cordova also medaled for the boys, but they did not advance.

“Something that makes golf a lot different is the amount of rules,” senior Courtney Birkenhesier said. “Sure, you don’t have a referee that is there enforcing the rules, but you are given a rule sheet that you have to reinforce throughout your group throughout the day.”

Golfers require both physical and mental skills to play and exercise, with the mental component of the game being more important than the physical. Professional golfers portray the game as being simple, but even they occasionally struggle to strike the ball straight or even execute a perfect shot.

“Keeping your cool mentally helps you just move on to the next hole and hopefully get a good shot off,” Birkenhesier said. “But it can also keep you from getting disqualified and a lot of penalties taken out on you.”

Win, lose, or draw, many professionals have inspired students to golf to the point of wanting to play for the school rather than just as a hobby.

“Tiger Woods is my favorite golfer, he’s just a huge inspiration in the golf community, which has inspired me to continue,” junior Alex Matthews said. “Wanting to try golf when I was in middle school to after absolutely falling in love with it and I decided to stick with it.”

Just like any other sport, golf has many sets of rules that not even the players can remember.

“One rule in golf that doesn’t make sense is the out of bounds play,” Matthews said. “What that means is that if your ball goes out of bounds, then you have to drop back to where you first hit it from. That doesn’t make any sense to me because you have to walk all the way back there.”

Throughout the United States golf is one of the most popular sports, but in high school it is one of the less popular sports compared to other extracurricular activities.

“The best way to get more people interested in golf is by just showing them what we do because it is actually a fun sport,” Matthews said. “But people don’t see that because they just see it as walking and hitting a ball while sitting with a stick.”

Having to perfect your swing at different distances, golf needs a lot of work to place the ball at the perfect spot to gain an advantage over others.

“My work ethic translates into golf because every time you go out onto the course, it’s a new day and you have to try your best to just keep going and get better,” Birkenhesier said. “It’s a lot of mental games that you really have to deal with, especially on the course and that you have to kind of fight against every day you go out.”