When postseason play roles around, coaches employ all sorts of motivational techniques to inspire their teams, showing film of a squad's greatest successes or reliving shortcomings to ensure they do not arise again.
Duke head coach Dan Brooks prefers to live in the present.
"I honestly don't think I've ever mentioned it this year. This is a new year, that was last year," he said, referencing the Blue Devils' come-from-behind victory on the back nine at the NCAA championship last May, the sixth national title of his career. "They've certainly gained some wonderful experience from that, but it doesn't need to be mentioned—it's there."
With a top-six finish at the NCAA regional at the Warren Course in South Bend, Ind., No. 6 Duke will again punch its ticket to the NCAA championship May 22-27 and earn a shot at defending its title crown. The Blue Devils earned the No. 2 seed in the regional and will play 54 holes beginning Thursday morning on the 6,301-yard course.
Although three members of the lineup that won the title last year in Tulsa, Okla., are no longer on the roster, the Blue Devils are still bringing a wealth of experience with them to South Bend.
Headlined by the two most recent ACC individual champions—top-ranked Leona Maguire and No. 10 Celine Boutier—Duke's roster boasts two team victories and 15 top-10 finishes but will also send three freshmen to a regional for just the second time in school history.
Maguire has played the most consistent golf of any Blue Devil this season. The freshman from Cavan, Ireland, placed in the top 10 in eight of Duke's nine tournaments this season and finished over par in just two of the nine. The rookie's most recent outing ended with a birdie putt on the second playoff hole that handed her the ACC individual title.
"It's definitely not something I expected—it's something I hoped I'd do," said Maguire, who was named ACC Player of the Year and ACC Freshman of the Year Wednesday. "When you look at the names that have gone up before and the amount of Duke players as well, it's great to be in such an elite group of players that have gone on to bigger and better things. You just try and play as well as you can, and every week I try to play as well as I can to help the team."
Maguire and her twin sister, Lisa, are just the latest products an open pipeline of international players who have arrived in Durham and excelled for Brooks. Of the seven golfers on Duke's roster, none hail from inside the United States, though two of them—sophomore Sandy Choi and senior Irene Jung—did attend high school in the United States.
Coming to Durham from Ireland required an adjustment period for Maguire, both on and off the golf course. Now prepared to hit the links at her first competition in Indiana, she noted that the different climates throughout the United States have produced a challenge that did not exist in Europe.
"We were in Arizona...and then coming back in North Carolina and just playing so many different golf courses in so many different states week after week," Maguire said. "The short period of time that you have to adjust to all the different grasses and the weather and those sort of conditions is not something I've had a lot of experience with. Coach and the upperclassmen are a great help with that. Most of the tournaments are at the same places every year so they can give advice and stuff, sort of prepare before we leave for a tournament."
But something Maguire has developed on her own through playing events in Europe and during her lone collegiate season is an acute awareness and mental toughness. On the decisive playoff hole at the ACC championship, she opted to use a five-wood for her approach shot rather than a three-wood, a choice Brooks said most golfers would not have made. But the decision paid off, giving the freshman even more valuable experience she can take with her into Duke's push for a seventh national title.
"Every little bit helps. Whenever you do something like that, there's a great value there—it's incredible value," Brooks said. "The only way you become equipped to win big tournaments is to do big things in competition and we've got a team that's done a lot of big things in competition—I can draw on that. Those specific things that she did are wonderful, but it's the accumulation of those types of things that she's had for many years in golf that make her as strong as she is mentally on the golf course."
Boutier spent part of the fall away from the Blue Devils competing at a handful of European Tour events and returned to post three top-10 finishes during her junior campaign after being named the National Player of the Year as a sophomore. The Montrouge, France, native has just one under-par tournament in 2015 but is capable of putting up plenty of red numbers to pace the Duke lineup.
Rounding out Duke's starting five for the three-day tournament will be Choi—who won the Cougar Classic in September—Lisa Maguire and freshman Gurbani Singh, who enters the regional fresh off the best tournament of her Duke career, notching a sixth-place finish at the ACC championship at five-under-par.
Duke played a couple of practice rounds during the weekend before heading to South Bend Tuesday and will be tested by the Warren Course. Brooks said he was glad to be at a regional with a tough course that will create separation among the 18-team field, which also includes No. 5 Arizona, No. 11 Oklahoma State and No. 14 Wake Forest.
"It's got a lot of character to it. It's going to be a good course. They'll have northern grasses growing pretty high so we'll probably have some rough, and that'll narrow up the fairway a little bit. I think that will separate [the field]," Brooks said. "There's nothing about it where you have to be an exceptionally good putter or anything, you just have to have all the parts."
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