Entering the Betsy Rawls Invitational, coach Jan Dowling said the No. 10 Gators were hungry for their first tournament win.
Their taste buds were salivating Monday.
Solid showings from Florida’s upperclassmen helped propel the team atop the 15-team leaderboard after its first round of action with a 285 (-3).
Texas sits in second three shots back, while third-place Oklahoma State trails by five.
Dowling said she was happy with how her team played and how poised they looked on the difficult par-72, 6,344-yard University of Texas Golf Club in Austin.
“This course is hard,” she said. “The greens are pretty quick and firm, and they handled it really well. To be under par [Monday] is great, and we’re going to keep trying to get under par every day.”
Unlike in UF’s previous tournaments, its seniors finally stepped up and produced at a high level Monday.
After a disappointing performance at the SEC/PAC-12 Challenge last week, Evan Jensen was stellar. She led Florida with a 4-under 68, tallying six birdies against only two bogeys.
Andrea Watts also got out of her fall-season funk, going even par for the day to tie her best round of the season.
Dowling revealed Jensen’s shaky play before Monday was the result of an elbow injury, and that she’s still battling through it.
“She’s really gutted her way through this fall season with her elbow injury,” Dowling said. “It’s really hard to play golf when you’re injured. She’s been coming out every day, no complaints, and staying tough. She hit it great [Monday], and the putts dropped for her.”
Posting the Gators’ second-best score, junior Mia Piccio shot a 1-under round after making three birdies and 13 pars against two bogeys. Piccio’s highlight of the day was a 30-foot birdie putt on her par-4, 17th hole.
“Mia showed a lot of maturity today,” Dowling said. “Probably a year or two ago, she would have started to get impatient with herself.”
For the day, freshman Camilla Hedberg and junior Isabelle Lendl both went 2-over.
Jensen sits in first place individually, while Piccio is tied for seventh with four other golfers. All five golfers in the Gators’ lineup finished in the top 26.
Competing in her first collegiate event as an individual, freshman Lena Weichselgartner tallied a 78 (+6), and is tied for 58th.
As a team, Florida went 8-under on par 5s, a statistic Dowling said was crucial to the team’s success Monday.
“We’re going to continue to take care of our own business,” Dowling said. “We like being in the lead, and we want to stay. We can’t control the other teams, but we can control ourselves and how we react to the good and the bad.”
