For a program with five national championships, expectations are always high. And according to head coach Dan Brooks, the time is now for his young Duke team to return to its place among the nation’s elite, as the Blue Devils return after an unsatisfying fall season.
“We’re not holding out for next year or the year after,” Brooks said in September. “We’re going to get it done this year.”
After contending for the overall win in multiple tournaments but coming up short, including a collapse at the Landfall Tradition in October in which Duke squandered a final round lead, the Blue Devils are hungry to return in 2011.
The No. 5 Blue Devils will look to 2010 ACC Player of the Year Lindy Duncan to lead the way for a talented, but relatively inexperienced squad. Duncan, a sophomore, will be joined by sophomores Stacey Kim and Courtney Ellenbogen, along with freshmen Aleja Cangrejo and Laetitia Beck. Senior Kim Donovan is the lone upperclassman in Brooks’s rotation.
Duncan boasted the best stroke average on the team in the fall with a 70.83. After closely missing chances to win individual titles in the early season, the sophomore will look to return to her winning ways this spring, and Duke’s schedule should present her with chances to contend for an individual win. After two consecutive tournaments in Louisiana, the Blue Devils return to North Carolina to compete in the Bryan National Collegiate before heading to Athens, Ga., where Duncan will defend her title in the Liz Murphy Collegiate Classic April 1-3. Duke then heads to the ACC Championships at familiar Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, N.C., where Duncan posted a team-high fourth place finish last year.
Duncan, however, is solely focused on the collective success of the Blue Devils.
“I haven’t thought about individual [goals] so much,” she said. “But as a team we’re just trying to focus on playing each tournament the best we can and if we get a couple of wins or even just one win that would be great.”
The Blue Devils typically kick off the spring season with a trip to Tucson, Ariz., to compete in the Wildcat Invitational. A change in that tournament’s annual date to the first weekend in February, though, meant that Duke simply wouldn’t have enough time to prepare, given the wintry conditions in Durham that limit the practice schedule. Instead, the Blue Devils will be heading to New Orleans, La., and the English Turn Golf and Country Club to compete in the Allstate Sugar Bowl Intercollegiate Championship this weekend.
While Duke has never ventured to English Turn before and will face the country’s top teams, Brooks is pleased with the progress his team has made over the last month of organized practices at the newly renovated Rod Myers Training Center.
“We’ve used the whole month of February [to prepare].... The difficult thing about playing in these kind of [cold] conditions is that your scores are just not going to be as low,” Brooks said. “There’s the psychological part of going low. Your game might be good enough to go low, but your mind isn’t ready to shoot 67s and 68s when you’ve been in these tough conditions [in practice].”
If Duke can take advantage of the favorable conditions in Louisiana, a top finish could prove the first step to returning to the nation’s elite.
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