Sophomore Monica Vaughn lines up her putt at the 2015 Clover Cup on Friday March 13, 2015 at Longbow Golf Club in Mesa. (J. Bauer-Leffler/The State Press)The busy month of March rolls on for the ASU women’s golf team, as it hosts the University of Denver Pioneers this Friday in Tempe for a dual event at Karsten Golf Course.
The entire rosters of both teams will compete on Friday with five designated players and the top four counting to the teams’ scores.
The Pioneers, ranked 51st by Golfweek, are coming off a fourth place team finish at the SunTrust Gator Invitational. Junior Isabel Southard led her team with a 10-over 220 finishing tied for sixth overall. Sophomore Jessica Carty also finished in the top-10 with a 14-over 224 finishing tied for 10th overall.
After their win at the Clover Cup last weekend, the Sun Devils jumped to 20th overall in the Golfweek rankings and now have two golfers in the top 25. Sophomore Monica Vaughn, who won the Clover Cup, is now the highest ranked Sun Devil at 22nd. Senior Noemi Jimenez is right behind her at 23rd.
Vaughn’s second place finish at the Clover Cup was highest tournament finish as Sun Devil and her 5-under 211 score was her best since last year’s Pac-12 Preview. She also led the entire tournament in pars, carding a total of 39 over the three rounds. Vaughn currently leads the Sun Devils with a 72.72 stroke average through six tournaments.
Jimenez, who remains the third-ranked woman amateur in the world, recorded her third top-five finish of the season and has rebounded since her 14-over 227 score at the Northrop Grumman Regional Challenge with back-to-back top-five finishes and has been able to maintain a stroke average of 72.78 through six tournaments.
Freshmen Sophia Zeeb and Roberta Liti both had their best finishes of their short Sun Devil careers at the Clover Cup, finishing 13th and 18th respectively. Keeping this momentum going for the veterans and newcomers on the team is crucial going into the matchup with Denver.
The Sun Devils are halfway through the four events they have scheduled in March and they have been a tale of two tournaments so far. The team finished in 13th place at the Darius Rucker Intercollegiate on March 8 with a 55-over 907 as a team, the worst team score of the season.
ASU followed that up with the team’s first tournament win of the season at the Clover Cup with a 21-over 885. That score was not the best of the year for the team, but the tournament win will certainly give them plenty of momentum heading into the final stretch of the season.
Not including the NCAA tournaments, the team only has four more events this spring. On paper, matching up one-on-one with 51st-ranked Denver should be a good way for the team to keep that momentum going into the more difficult events later this month and into April.
ASU begins that final stretch facing off with Denver starting at 11 a.m. in Tempe.
Reach the reporter at wslane@asu.edu or follow @bill_slane on Twitter.
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