After Monday’s round at the UNC-Wilmington Lady Seahawk Classic, William and Mary sat in ninth place out of 10 teams, looking at Tuesday’s final round as its last chance to move up the leaderboard and salvage its trip to North Carolina.
But the golf gods weren’t on the Tribe’s side, as the third round was called off due to inclement weather, making the second round the final round and leaving the College near the bottom of the tournament.
The Tribe shot a 651 overall, 75 above par and 48 shots off the pace of the invitational’s winner, Conference-USA’s East Carolina University — which shot 27 over par — and ahead of only Siena College, whose 674 strokes placed it dead last.
Perhaps more worrisome for the Tribe than the tournament’s winner, though, were the other teams the College finished behind. With less than three weeks before the CAA Championships, the College finished well off the pace of Old Dominion and James Madison, as well as 12 shots behind UNC-Wilmington — all teams that the College will face again in the conference championships
The Tribe took 325 strokes in the first round — again better than only Siena — before shooting a 326 overall in the second, better than two other scores that round. But the relative second-round improvement wasn’t good enough to overtake the Big South’s Gardner-Webb — which finished just five strokes ahead of the College — for eighth place.
Individually, the Tribe was led by junior Kristen Hamel, whose 159 shots were good for 15 above par and a tie for 22nd place on the final individual leaderboard. Fifteen strokes is the closest the Missouri native has come to par at the end of any tournament this spring season.
Behind Hamel for the College was freshman Emily Gimpel, who finished 34th overall. Sophomore Betsy Birchall finished in a tie for 44th place, while junior Caroline Sweet landed in a 47th-place tie and senior Sarah Whitney finished in 50th place.
The bottom-end of the leaderboard is not uncharted territory for the Tribe this season. While the Lady Seahawk Invitational came on the heels of one of the College’s better performances — the team finished eighth of 22 at the C&F Bank Invitational about two weeks earlier — it was the third of four spring season tournaments in which the Tribe finished in the bottom half of the tournament.