By Chandler Harris, Assistant Sports Editor
The golf team travels to Austin on Sunday for the St. Edward’s Spring Invitational tournament. St. Edward’s University will be sponsoring the tournament at Grey Rock Golf Club. The team completed qualifying for the tournament Wednesday afternoon.
“I have four people who are going for sure,” head coach Mike Campbell said. “We had a tie for the fifth spot on the team, so those two players will play a tiebreaker round.”
The four players who already have qualified are seniors Patrick Hanauer and Hilton Funk, sophomore Cyril Bouniol and freshman Morgan Johnson.
Fourteen schools will send teams to compete, including St. Edward’s, University of California-San Diego, St. Mary’s, Southwestern Oklahoma and Newman. The University of Texas also will be sending a junior varsity team to play.
“St. Edward’s is a really good school, and they have a really strong team,” Campbell said.
He said the players on the Wildcat team have been working on different parts of their game over the past two weeks.
“When you have different players, they have different strengths and weaknesses,” Campbell said. “The different players emphasize different areas that they need to work on, but overall, we work on everything.”
The Wildcats are coming off an impressive performance at the Dustdevil Open on Feb. 10, where the team finished in first place, including the top three individual performances.
“Morgan, Hilton and Cyril played really well in that first tournament, and Patrick was one of our best players in the fall,” Campbell said. “Patrick is coming off of a back injury that prevented him from playing in the first tournament, but he is feeling better and should be good to play in Austin.”
The Wildcats have four tournaments before the Lone Star Conference Tournament, but the St. Edward’s Spring Invitational is as important as any of them, Campbell said. Each tournament the team plays factors into whether they make the regional tournament or not.
“We have a great team this year with two seniors leading us in Patrick Hanuer and Hilton Funk,” said Charles Levitte, member of the golf team. “Because we have to qualify to make the team each tournament, we push each other to get better every time.”
Levitte said this tournament is important because these are the schools they will be competing against all season.
Each team in the region has a head-to-head record against any other team it competes in a tournament with in the spring. The top 10 teams from each region advance to the regional tournament. Currently, the Wildcats are ranked No. 3 in their region.
“Our goal is to win the tournament, but at the least we want to win as many matchups as possible against the teams in our region,” Campbell said.
