NGI SCORES<\/a><\/p>\nWyoming may be a cold-weather team, but the Cowgirls have found a dessert home at Southern Dunes. For the past several seasons, both the men\u2019s and women\u2019s teams have hosted events at the course in early April.<\/p>\n
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Stender said familiarity with the golf course played a big role in her team\u2019s confident start.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re very comfortable on this golf course and I think a lot of it has to do with the sense of pride and the real ownership they have,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s our home away from home so while the course setup was a little bit different than how we play it, I think that they took advantage of knowing where not to miss and with our length, we knew we could take advantage of the par 5s and some of the shorter par 4s.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wyoming led the field in par-5 scoring, going 6 under on those holes (outscoring Bradley by four shots) and also had the most birdies (17) of any of the 10 teams in the field.<\/p>\n
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Stender, in two decades leading Wyoming, had never taken a team to the postseason before. The NGI went onto the team\u2019s list of core goals in the fall and Stender told her players that if they continued to chip away at it and take advantage of key events on the schedule where she knew the team could perform well, the NGI was within reach.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think our spring, especially late spring, we started playing up to our potential,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
After finishing fourth as a team at the Mountain West Conference Championship, the chatter went up a level. Freshman Kiley Reisner was on the bubble for an at-large bid into NCAA Regionals as an individual and Meghan Vogt had already been accepted into the PGA Works National Championship.<\/p>\n
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When the NGI invitation came through, Stender\u2019s first call went to Vogt. A player can only compete in one postseason event in a season.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe thought about it a little bit and called me literally within an hour and said nope, I want to play with the team,\u201d Stender said. \u201cWe have one more left in us.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat put the cherry on top. I told everyone else and they were so excited.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wyoming\u2019s men have competed in the NGI two of the past three years (the Cowboys were runner-up in the inaugural event) and are in the field again next week. Stender and head men\u2019s coach Joe Jensen have a close coaching relationship \u2013 Stender looks at Jensen as a mentor and big brother.<\/p>\n
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Jensen was all in when it came to Stender taking a team to the NGI \u2013 no matter the circumstances, no matter what players may or may not be in the lineup.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe experience your team is going to get to continue to play, continue to practice, build on the things we\u2019ve been focusing on all year is just such a springboard to their summer, to next year,\u201d Stender said in relaying Jensen\u2019s advice. \u201cHe was definitely all in. I always told him \u2026 that I never wanted to play in the event unless I knew we could be competitive and I knew this was our year.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the first round, Wyoming has three players (Reisner, Elle Higgins and Vogt) inside the top seven individually. Reisner posted 3-under 69 for the individual lead.<\/p>\n
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Stender calls her freshman \u201ca competitor to the core,\u201d and a player whose prodigious length off the tee sets her up well to score, particularly at Southern Dunes. She credits Reisner with stepping up her wedge game in her first season to take her game to the next level.<\/p>\n
Reisner, who won twice and finished in the top 10 six times in 10 stroke-play starts this season, had the flu the first tournament of the fall, but gutted out 36 holes on a 100-degree day anyway and tied for 10th that week. Stender still remembers it \u2013 the ultimate example of what this team is about.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t ever count out a player from Wyoming.<\/p>\n
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Gritty group from Wyoming builds big opening cushion at Women\u2019s NGI<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Play college golf in Wyoming, and resilience is just a part of the job description. Josey Stender\u2019s squad…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672702,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[443],"tags":[49,48,622,247568,247570,247567,247569,82,247571,7010],"class_list":["post-672701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-golf","tag-josey-stender","tag-kiley-reisner","tag-ngi","tag-southern-dunes","tag-sports","tag-stender","tag-wyoming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}