Kats on to McKinney, seek third league title
4/10/2016 10:00:00 AM | Softball
HUNTSVILLE – For the first time since 2012-13, the Sam Houston State women's golf team enters postseason play with a pair of regular-season tournament wins under their belt. The squad hopes to continue that momentum when it matters most.
Sam Houston tees off at the 15th annual Southland Conference Women's Golf Championship on Monday at the Hill Course at Stonebridge Country Club in McKinney, Texas. The 6,251-yard par 72 will be hosting its second consecutive Southland championship.
“The mindset of the team is positive,” associate coach Tommy Chain said. “We are having some great workouts. We're working on short game and working on confidence there. That's an important part of success. We're talking about our wins this season and what we did to pull it off. We want to kind of feed off those to take into conference.”
The conference tournament is slated to tee off Monday at 8 a.m. Pairings are based on team seeding, which is calculated using the Golfstat rankings. Players will play 18 holes of golf Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 8 a.m.
Eight Southland universities field a women's golf team: Central Arkansas, Houston Baptist, UIW, Lamar, McNeese State, Sam Houston State, Stephen F. Austin and Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.
“We have five teams that have won tournaments this year,” Chain said. “It's going to be a very exciting conference championship because it's wide open. It's getting stronger every year. It makes for a very exciting venue with multiple teams trying to get to the Regionals.”
Sam Houston, which has won the league championship twice, with the last coming in 2007, is looking for its first NCAA Regionals appearance. The Bearkats are led by junior Heather Shake and senior Nicole Budnik who rank fifth and sixth in the league respectively.
“All the girls at one point or another have been a nice surprise,” Chain said. “Nicole Budnik has been very consistent this year as has Heather. That is exciting to be first-team all-conference with another good showing. A great outcome would be for the strong players to carry the team and the others players do what they've done in other tournaments with a good finish.”
Sam Houston secured fifth place a season ago, shooting a three-day score of 919. Lamar has won the most Southland tournament titles with six, including the last three tournaments, followed by Sam Houston's two and Texas A&M-Corpus Christi with one.
“The thing that will define success is all five girls hitting on all cylinders for three rounds,” Chain said. “We have done that multiple times. We have the confidence to win because we have beaten all these teams this year. We are definitely positive if we play the way we did at multiple tournaments we can come away with victory.”
Live scoring for the 2016 Southland Conference Women's Golf Championship will be available at www.southland.org/WGolf.
