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INDIANAPOLIS – The fifth edition of the Great Midwest Athletic Conference Men’s & Women’s Golf Championships tees off next week at the familiar site of Four Bridges Country Club in the greater Cincinnati area.
The spring championship season is in full swing following the completion of women’s tennis over the weekend at Cedarville. Talented student-athletes in the men’s field will represent seven institutions while the women’s side features a five-team race.
First-round coverage of the G-MAC Golf Championships officially tees off Monday morning at 8 a.m. EST with fixed tee-times. The final round will start with a 9 a.m. EST shotgun start on Tuesday. For the first time, live scoring will be offered on Golfstat.com.
The scoring links for both tournaments can be viewed by clicking above the story. All-conference teams for both genders are determined by order of finish and a coaches vote after the conclusion.
Sunday evening will feature a pre-championship banquet at the Embassy Suites in Blue Ash where the season’s accomplishments will be recognized and coaches will have an opportunity to speak about their respective programs.
This will be the third year that Four Bridges Country Club is serving as host for the Great Midwest tournaments. For some faces in the field, returning to a familiar site could help produce low scores if the weather cooperates.
In four years, the league has yet to see a conference champion rise from the pack other than Trevecca Nazarene. The gap has certainly narrowed, but the Trojans head into this year’s tournament once again as the presumed favorite and the hunted.
The men’s and women’s teams gave a preview of things to come in the shortened fall season where the inaugural Great Midwest Fall Invitational at Shaker Run C.C. in Lebanon, Ohio, was conducted.
The TNU men had to overcome a four-stroke deficit in the second round to eventually take home team hardware by one shot while the Trojans’ women led wire-to-wire to complete the institutional sweep.
Men
TNU sophomore Larken Whittemore leads the league in scoring with a 74.2 average through 11.5 rounds. The Trojans also lead the conference in team scoring average at 299.5 per 18 holes and own the G-MAC’s lowest team score of the season with a 280 (-8) fired at the Mississippi College Invitational.
Last year’s climactic finish in the men’s individual race included a three-way playoff. Two of those finalists are back as Cedarville’s Jordan Reese and TNU’s Payton Williams attempt to win outright this time around.
TNU owns four of the top-10 scoring leaders (Whittemore, Landon Cottrell, Reese Scobey) while first-year league member Malone possesses three, including Jacob English, Kyle Barnett and Robert Maloney II.
And for the Pioneers that doesn’t quite include Scotty Brown, proud owner of the G-MAC’s best single-round score (66) and Jarrod Kasunick, who tied for first with English at the OVU Spring Challenge to conclude the regular season.
Reese and Taylor Holt five the Yellow Jackets of Cedarville as good of a 1-2 punch as any lineup. Same goes for D&E with Alistair Kyle and Kollin Hopwood each winning conference athlete of the week/month accolades this year. And don’t discount the trio of Adam Jeffries, Seth Vannoy and Logan Lojszcyk, who each finished in the top 10 at last year’s conference spring meet. Kentucky Wesleyan’s Christian Tooley has a pair of top-five finishes to his credit and Ohio Valley’s Adam O’Hara has emerged as the scoring leader for the Fighting Scots in 11 events.
Women
Trevecca Nazarene senior Alexa Rippy has cemented her legacy and then some with four more medalist tourney wins in her final campaign. She has proven to be more than a worth adversary at the regional level and is the odds-on favorite to make it three straight individual wins at Four Bridges.
The senior from Clarksville, Tenn., leads the conference in scoring by almost six full strokes followed by teammates Rachel McMahan and Lexie Shaw. Rippy has finished in the top five for six events and has been top 10 in seven of the team’s eight tournaments.
TNU’s best round of the season was a 310 in the first round of the Phoenix Invitational and the Trojans average 330.1 over 16 rounds on the year.
Each institution has at least one player represented in the top-10 women’s scoring leaders as the season has unfolded.
Malone’s Melanie Smith won conference honors in the fall and spring as she sports an 87.0 average, good for fourth. Alderson Broaddus has two in the top 10, Julia Heser and Randee Seevers, Ohio Valley’s Victoria Nichols had her best round at the UPike Spring Invite and Ursuline’s Kennedy Fay, another conference athlete of the week, owns all 10 of the Arrows’ best 18-hole scores in 2016-17.