March 24, 2008
Go behind the scenes of Illinois women's golf with "Chip Shots", the online golf journal. In the third spring edition of the season, freshman Raquel Hopton recaps the team's season-opening spring break trip.
We just returned from our Spring Break trip. It was a very eventful and exciting 12 days. Starting off the season with a victory at the University of Florida tournament in Gainesville really gave our team the boost of confidence we needed. We felt prepared going into our first tournament of the spring because we had been keeping our game sharp at the Demirjian Indoor Facility over the winter. I had a good tournament in Florida, finishing 3rd place individually and setting my new low career score and finish. It was beautiful weather and it gave us a great attitude going to the Samford Intercollegiate at Limestone Springs in Alabama. Even though we had a rough last round, we still came out in the top 4. We tied the lowest round in school history during the second round (291) with Kristine (shooting a 69 which is her career low!) finishing 6th and Seul Ki finishing 3rd. Congrats girls!
After we played in Alabama we traveled to Georgia to practice for a few days. We went to the Country Club of Birmingham to play, but due to storms, we couldn't get out and play :(. We got the opportunity to play at TPC at Sugarloaf with some Alumni from the U of I. That was an experience I will not soon forget. It was a beautiful course and it is the site of the AT&T Classic that will be played in May. It will be cool to see a course on television that I have played before. The next day we got to play at Summer Grove at Canongate in Newnan, GA, which is the site of the Women's Western Amateur tournament that I will be participating in this summer. Today we played at Fairfield Plantation Golf Course at the Wyndham Resort which is where Coach Slone and her husband used to live and work.
In between rounds and traveling from state to state we got some games of Uno in and we introduced Yahtzee on this trip which turned out to be a pretty good game for us. Kristi dominated, but the rest of us started to get the hang of it towards the end! Overall the trip was a success and all the girls had a great time. Even though Nancy was battling the flu for a couple days and Kristine had a pretty bad sunburn, we had fun and learned what we need to work on to prepare for our next competition. We are looking forward to our home tournament, which is April 4-5 at Stone Creek Golf Club in Urbana. We are hoping for a big turnout to support us! Hope to see you there!
~Raquel
