(Photo: Courtesy of Sun Devil Athletics)
After an up-and-down roller coaster ride of a season, Arizona State women’s golf head coach Missy Farr-Kaye and her team finished off the regular season with back-to-back second-place finishes, and now buckles up for the whole new ride that is the postseason.
The No. 22 Sun Devils will head to the Big 12 Conference Championships this week at the Dallas Athletic Club from April 23-25. This tournament will be a three-round event over three days using the standard stroke-play collegiate format, where only the top four scores of each round are counted toward the team score.
The last time out for the Sun Devils was a special one as they wrapped up their season with the PING ASU, their one home tournament of the year at Papago Golf Club. The outing was an impressive one as ASU was able to hold onto second, after shooting under-par in all three rounds for a final team score of 12-under.
This week, the Sun Devils enter a 14-team field void of any true national contenders, with no one falling inside the top 20 ranked teams in the country, but 8 teams ranked between 20 and 40.
Oklahoma State leads the way as the Sun Devils’ top competitor, being the only team ranked higher than them at No. 21. They are followed by No. 25 Iowa State, No. 26 Baylor, No. 29 Arizona, No. 36 Houston, No. 37 Kansas and No. 38 Kansas State.
Oklahoma State is led by junior Marta Silchenko, who is the second-highest-ranked golfer in the Big 12 this season at No. 30 in the country per SCOREBOARD. She won her most recent start at the Huntington Bank Collegiate, where she won with a score of 13-under-par.
The two top seniors in this event are Pimpisa Sisutham from UCF and Pimkwan Chookaew from Iowa State, both of whom rank inside the top 15 of the LPGA Collegiate Advancement Pathway, similar to that of PGA Tour University in men’s golf.
For the Sun Devils, they will return superstar redshirt junior Patience Rhodes for the first time all semester, after a leg injury over winter break kept her out for an extended period of time. Her only start of this spring campaign came at the Augusta National Women’s Amateur, where she was able to make the cut and finish tied 31st with a 3-over-par final score.
The Sun Devils will also roll out their pair of seniors in Beth Coulter and Paula Schulz-Hanssen, both of whom are coming off impressive performances at the PING ASU. Both shot under par, with Coulter leading the way between the two and shooting 3-under-par, which tied her for 12th place after a 2-under-par final round.
Schulz-Hanssen was right behind her with a 2-under-par final score for a tied 14th-place finish that saw her open with a bogey-free, 4-under-par round.
However, no performance was more impressive from the Sun Devils’ home outing than that of their newest member of the team, freshman Pimpisa Rubrong. She shot a highly impressive 7-under-par final score that saw her finish just one stroke off the lead in a four-way tie for 2nd place. This included a 4-under-round in round two, along with just five bogeys for the whole tournament.
The final player ASU will roll out in its starting five will be sophomore Isla McDonald-O’Brien. She was easily the most disappointing of the group the last time ASU tee’d it up. She shot a final score of 3-over-par and tied for 28th after a poor second round that saw her shoot a 75, 3-over par.
Freshman Kate Dillon appears to be teeing off for ASU as an individual competitor. She, too, did not have her best stuff at Popago as she also signed for a 3-over-par final score after not shooting under-par for any of the three rounds.
The Sun Devils will look to not only win the conference championship but book their place in Regionals as a high seed in early May, and then potentially return to nationals for the third year in a row, trying to bring home their ninth national championship and first since 2017.
