Kelly Grassel has an advantage on the Florida women’s golf team that no one else has.
She’s the only player on the roster who’s played in The Landfall Tradition at the Peter Dye Course in Wilmington, N.C.
Grassel participated in the tournament as a freshman at Michigan State, before transferring to UF.
She finished the event at 15-over-par and in a tie for 41st place. With the experience of playing on the course beforehand, Grassel has been giving pointers to the team on what they can expect from the course.
"It’s definitely a challenge," Grassel said. "The greens are pretty big and there’s lots of slope to them, so I think we’ll be doing some short game practice."
The tournament in Wilmington will be the last one in the fall for the Gators and they’ll be facing 17 teams, including eight ranked in the top 25 in the country. Southeastern Conference foe No. 1 South Carolina headlines the field.
After having disappointing finishes in the first two tournaments, Grassel said the team is working hard in practice and on the things they can control.
"Our mindset is just staying positive and being able to do the things that we’ve been working on in practice and have those carry over to the course," she said.
Along with Grassel, Florida’s lineup will include junior Ursa Orehek and freshman Taylor Tomlinson, who along with Grassel, competed in the first two tournaments.
Rounding out the lineup will be sophomore’s Maria Torres and Karolina Vlckova.
Coach Emily Glaser admits the team has been dealing with injuries heading into the tournament.
"We’re a little beat up to be honest, we’ve got a couple of girls that’ll be going that probably aren’t 100 percent," Glaser said.
"They’ve either had injuries, or kind of coming off some sickness, they haven’t had a tremendous amount of practice."
With the last event for the fall getting underway today before a three month break until the spring, Glaser wants the team to focus on what it’s been during the fall.
"We’ve talked so much about the process and I think they’re really buying into that," Glaser said. "Of course we want to well, of course we want to win, we want to be competitive…trying to stay in process mode and really think about the things we can do on a daily basis and if we focus on that we’ll start to see the results that we’re looking for."
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