From practicing almost every day to tournaments more than twice a week, golf can be very stressful and time consuming. But freshman Anna Cafferty has managed to rank number one on the HHS 2015 varsity team this year, and freshman Sydni Sullivan ranked second.
Cafferty has been playing golf since the summer before eighth grade when she decided to quit softball. After she stopped playing softball, she knew she would play golf all through high school and maybe even college if a scholarship is involved.
Sullivan played when she was little, but really started to pick back up on it last summer and grew to like it even more. Both love to golf whether it’s competitively or just going out for a few hours on the weekends.
“When you’re golfing competitively, there’s not more pressure where you have to do good every single time you go golfing, but there’s more pressure on being precise with your score. When you’re golfing on the weekends it’s just like hey I’m just going to hit this and it’s okay if it’s bad because I’m practicing,” Cafferty says.
Though Cafferty and Sullivan are top on the golf course, it can definitely be tough to keep up on the academic portion of it.
“You miss a lot of school. It’s like you’re running in a race and somebody trips you and then you get back up and you start running faster and as soon as you’re catching up to the group someone trips you again – the trip is the homework and it’s hard to really be all the way caught up,” Cafferty says.
The team practices daily after school but Sullivan and Cafferty usually go out to Southern Hills Golf Course once on the weekend to practice for two hours or more. Team practices consist of nine practice holes and practicing on the driving range or things they need to improve on. The golfer’s’ individual practice time is more important than their practice time as a team for more reasons than one.
“It’s more individual than team but your team does play a part because you do have that overall team score but it’s more on your part to do well and it’s pretty much all on you,” Sullivan says.
The team might not help Cafferty and Sullivan in their individual score, but they can help them in other ways in terms of improving and feeling comfortable with all the new things around them.
“They are very supportive of us being in the top rank and they always have a smile on their face and even if Anna and I beat them they always congratulate us and have a good attitude about it and if I hit a bad shot a teammate will say ‘It’s okay focus on the next one’. Teammates really help get you back to focus and concentrating on your next shot and helping you out,” Sullivan says.
Without all the practice time they wouldn’t be ranked where they are today, practice really does make perfect.
