Todd Oehrlein addresses the media prior to home event
September 20, 2010 | Women's Golf
Sept. 20, 2010
• Listen to Todd Oehrlein News Conference
Madison, Wis. - UW head women's golf coach Todd Oehrlein addressed the media at the regular Monday news conference prior to hosting the Badger Invitational Sun-Mon., Sept. 26-27 at University Ridge Golf Course in Madison.
Todd Oehrlein: We’re obviously very excited about hosting the Badger Invitational. It’s always, it’s always great to be at home. In our sport, we don’t get a lot of opportunity to do that. The typical golf schedule consists of you host one invitational a year, and the rest of the time you travel.
We do have one tournament already under out belt, the Cougar Classic. We went down to Charleston, South Carolina. It was a 21-team field. We finished ninth. A good, a solid start, that’s how I would probably classify it. It was a solid start.
The first two rounds, 303 and 302, were good rounds. We let a few shots slip away at the end on the first day. The second day was a much more difficult golf course, and so we played pretty well.
And then I was very proud of how we played, and very pleased with what I saw in the final round. Shot 292, put a lot of pressure on the golf course to make some birdies, make some things happen, and really were in a position for a low score all day long, and finished strong as well, finished a good round off. So that’s encouraging. That’s a characteristic you always like to see out of your teams. And hopefully, we can continue that as the season moves forward.
When you look at our roster overall, 11 players, you’ll see 5 freshmen and 3 sophomores. So top to bottom, it’s a pretty young golf team this year. I’m confident and comfortable with the experience that we have though. I think we’ll have decent leadership throughout the course of the year. We do return players that played last year and have some competitive rounds under their belt for us in our program. So I’m encouraged by that.
I think we’re going to be a fairly balanced, consistent team. I see, right now through the early parts of the season, seven players in particular have been pretty consistent, pretty strong. I think they’re in position where they can help us throughout the course of the season. And the other players are young and learning. I see a lot of growth, or a lot of opportunity for growth and a lot of potential in those players as well.
The lineup for the upcoming season, or for the upcoming tournament, I’m sorry, we still haven’t narrowed that so I can’t really comment as to who exactly will be in the lineup. We have two players in Jessie (Gerry) and Alyssa (Elliott) who are both dealing with some injuries right now. And so they’re somewhat uncertain for the upcoming weekend. And we’ll find out how that plays out throughout the week.
QUESTION #1: Does Carly (Werwie) kind of feel like she needs to be the leader of this club?
OEHRLEIN: I think Carly looks for that, yeah. I was very pleased with Carly this last weekend in South Carolina. And she looked very confident, very comfortable in what she was doing, hit the ball very solidly the final round. The first two rounds maybe didn’t hit the ball as well as she would have liked, and I still saw a lot of composure and a lot of confidence from her. Found a way to score, found a way to stay in the round. Those are all really positive signs to see. You know, she showed that she has experience, and I think that leadership will come through throughout the season.
QUESTION #2: Can you just expand a little bit on the injuries to Jessie and Alyssa, and how comfortable I guess you are with, if they’re not in the lineup?
OEHRLEIN: They’re two of our better players for sure. And we, they’re going to be in our lineup throughout the course of the season obviously. Jessie’s just coming off a hand injury that happened in the summer is just getting back into playing some golf. And so it’s just getting her going. And Alyssa just has an injury right now that we really can’t comment on a whole lot.
QUESTION #3: With how young your team is, do you have to be patient? Are you a patient coach?
OEHRLEIN: You definitely have to be patient, yeah. There’s a lot of potential though. There’s a lot of opportunity for these players to get better. And that’s exciting. So you kind of, you talk about patience, and how patient are you. You try to turn it into potential and opportunity in areas for growth. And you just meet with them on a regular basis and try to develop their golf games.
They’re just, you know, if their golf swing is solid, and it’s easy, they play well and they score. But when the golf game isn’t just perfect on that day, how’s a short game hold up, how do they hold up mentally, management, things like that, and that’s an area where that inexperience really, I mean, you can see it. It’s identifiable.
QUESTION #4: I haven’t had a chance to play there yet this year, but I just keep hearing that the Ridges is getting better and better every day. And apparently it will be getting even better when the greens are replaced next year, if I’m not mistaken too. Is it playing about as well as it has?
OEHRLEIN: The gold course is fantastic. It was a challenging summer for a lot of golf courses this year. I mean, it was hot, and all the rain, it was a challenging summer. And so some of the greens on the Back 9 are not where they would like it to be right now, just solely because of site conditions. Back in the woods, there’s not a lot of air movement. The heat’s trapped back there. And so they’ve had some of that.
Fairways, tees, everything’s fantastic. The greens on the golf course where they’re exposed are in great shape. You know, the golf course continues to improve. They have great direction and great leadership at the gold course right now. Mike Gaspard is the General Manager at University Ridge and Aron Hogden is the Superintendent. And they both have built a great staff, have great direction, great leadership, and really have done a lot.
And then, working relationship, they’ve gone out of their way to make us feel comfortable and make us at home, and provide opportunity for our teams to get better, both my team and Jim’s. So that’s been outstanding.
The greens that you alluded to and mentioned, right now, I don’t think we’re going to go through with that next year. I think that’s going to be on hold right now. And I know there was a lot of, it kind of got out that they were definitely going to go forward with that on the green renovation. And I think right now they’re going to look at some other options before they pursue that.
