Entering last fall, Wake Forest head coach Kim Lewellen was asked to diagnose why her Demon Deacons, world-beaters each of the last two regular seasons, had fallen flat in their two trips to Grayhawk for the NCAA Division I Women’s Championship. Two seasons ago at nationals, Wake fell from seventh to 12thth on the final stroke-play day to miss match play, and last year, the Deacs didn’t even make it to Monday, placing 16th.
“With the caliber of players we have and the outside goals they have, we need to balance that better so that they are rested and peaking at NCAAs,” Lewellen said back in August. “We have great players who can play any golf course, so I don’t think it’s that we’re not ready for the golf course, I just think we’ve been tired the last two times.”
This spring, the Demon Deacons wound down their spring slate more than a full month prior to the start of the ACC Championship and also took a spring-break trip to Walt Disney World. And on Friday afternoon in Scottsdale, Arizona, No. 2-ranked Wake looked refreshed playing alongside No. 1 Stanford and No. 3 LSU. The Demon Deacons beat those two schools by a combined 24 shots and fired a 9-under 279 to take a one-shot lead over Oklahoma State, which played in the morning wave.
Senior Lauren Walsh was the early standout for Wake, birdieing Nos. 6-9 to close out a 5-under 67. Fellow senior Rachel Kuehn and sophomore Mimi Rhodes each added one-bogey 70s, and no Wake player shot over par – not even sophomore Carolina Chacarra, who had two doubles on her card.
“We are very pleased with how the team played today,” Lewellen said Friday. “All their practice and preparation this season has been for this event. It is definitely a marathon, not a sprint, but we are hoping to carry this momentum through the rest of the week.”
The top-ranked and reigning national champion Cardinal got off to a slow start, 8 over after playing the back nine, but freshman Megha Ganne birdied No. 4-7 to shoot 68, junior Sadie Englemann added a 71 and Rose Zhang shot even par to offset poor rounds from Kelly Xu (77, although she did birdie two of her last three) and Rachel Heck (82), who notched zero birdies in her first competitive round since October.
Stanford’s even-par day slots the Card T-7 along with Duke and Florida State.
Georgia, which made match play last year before falling to Stanford in the quarterfinals, is tied for third with South Carolina, another perennial power that has struggled to crack Grayhawk’s code, at 2 under. New Mexico and Texas A&M, a reigning national semifinalist, share fifth at 1 under.
LSU got an opening 70 from senior Ingrid Lindblad, but it also had to count a 78 and is solo 18th at 6 over. USC had to count a 79 as senior Malia Nam carded an 8-over-par 13 at the par-5 fourth hole in shooting 85. The ninth-ranked Trojans are T-20 with Augusta, the worst-ranked team in the field at No. 82 in Golfstat.
No. 5 Mississippi State is the lowest top-10 squad on the leaderboard at T-26 at 13 over.
Individually, Oklahoma State’s Maddison Hinson-Tolchard leads at 6 under, a shot clear of Walsh. Ganne, Texas Tech’s Shannon Tan, San Jose State’s Lucia Lopez-Ortega and Hinson-Tolchard’s Oklahoma State teammate Rina Tatematsu are all T-3 at 4 under.