With the fall roster consisting of only two players, not enough to compete in any tournaments as a team, the ASU women’s golf team’s spring season looked to be in dire straits.
To the surprise of their opponents, the three international freshmen arriving in the spring semester, Laura Blanco and Daniela Ordonez from Colombia and Justine Lee from Australia, have been more than capable of carrying the burden.
Playing in every one of the eight necessary tournaments to qualify for the postseason, the talented threesome have had a player finish in the top 25 on six occasions, with the highest finish, fourth, coming from Lee and Ordonez in the ASU Triangular and the Paradise Desert Classic, respectively.
All three came to ASU during the start of the spring semester, which means a lot of transition had to be made fast.
“To come in January as freshmen, all the change, all your roommate stuff and dorms, different food, different culture, different language, it’s pretty stunning what they were able to accomplish,” ASU coach Melissa Luellen said. “They knew it was going to be tough. We tried to prepare them for it, and I think they have done a remarkable job.”
Blanco said that initially, no one was sure if the transition would be a smooth one.
“At the first moment I was a little bit afraid of thinking how it was going to be,” Blanco said. “Everybody was looking at us. How we were going to play? How we were going to do? How was our season going to be?”
Getting used to ASU, one of the largest schools in the nation, was no easy task either. However, Lee says there are aspects of the school she enjoys.
“The campus is massive,” Lee said. “It is great that everything is all together and we don’t have to travel far. I think here at ASU we are very spoiled, in that we get a lot of support and the people are very nice. I was very excited at first, because I hadn’t been away from home for long periods of time. It allows me to appreciate what I had at home. The support group at home was immensely larger, but then it’s great being over here, too.
“You create new friends, build new bonds. It’s just a whole new experience that I would not give up. It’s been great.”
While many students experience homesickness, it has hit the three freshmen the hardest, especially with all the traveling.
“Being here is an amazing opportunity that life has given me,” Ordonez said. “It has been really challenging being far from home. Sometimes you feel like you want to just grab a plane and go back. The support from the people that are here is what makes me want to stay. The golf experience is what motivates me to keep trying and giving my best to this challenge.”
However, the part that has seemed to hit the players the hardest, at least for Ordonez, is the food.
“Food has been the most difficult issue for me, because back home I used to eat homemade things, and here you have a lot of food [that] is processed,” she said. “It tastes good, but I feel like it actually doesn’t feed me. There’s a lot of food that attracts you here, but you cannot eat it, because otherwise you will get really, really fat, and so you have to be really careful about it.”
Ordonez also said that while she loves to cook, it has been hard for her to find the time. The team has been on the road so frequently this season.
Lee agreed that adjusting to the food was tough, especially as an athlete.
“You have got to be really careful of what you eat over here,” Lee said. “The campus food is great, everything is there for us, but we’ve just got to be wise in choosing what we eat. The nutritional values on the back of the packaging, we had to learn how to read that. You get more cravings here.”
Getting used to playing as often as they did came as a struggle for the freshmen, but now they are done and look ahead to the postseason.
“It was kind of pushing it toward the end, but we are a strong team, and we pulled through it,” Lee said.
Reach the reporter at jjmckelv@asu.edu
