The season is over for the Idaho women’s golf team, except for senior Leilanie Kim, who is competing at the NCAA South Bend Regional in South Bend, Indiana, Thursday to Saturday.
Even though the entire team wasn’t able to advance to the regional, Idaho still had some highlight moments this season including awards from the Big Sky Conference.
The Vandals were preseason favorites to win the Big Sky, but came up just short at the Big Sky Conference Championship, taking third. They finished three strokes behind champion Northern Arizona April 21 in Chandler, Arizona. Kim tied for fourth individually.
Idaho showed how deep its team was this year when it filled three out of the five first-team All-Big Sky spots including Kim, senior Kaitlyn Oster and junior Kristin Strankman. Sophomore Amy Hasenoehrl earned an honorable mention spot.
“We definitely had a lot more depth this year, which helped us, allowed us to win,” Idaho coach Lisa Johnson said. “We haven’t had as much depth in recent years and we look forward to having more depth in the future years.”
The Vandals earned two team wins during the regular season, with one coming in the fall and one in the spring. Idaho won the New Mexico State Aggie Invitational by 10 strokes Oct. 8 in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Oster tied for first individually.
“It was one of Idaho golf’s best performances ever,” Johnson said of the New Mexico State Aggie Invitational.
The Vandals’ second win came in the first invitational of the spring season at the Delta Gamma Challenge Feb. 16 in New Braunfels, Texas. Idaho tied with Arkansas-Little Rock, but the Vandals won the tiebreaker.
“We had a very successful year,” Johnson said. “We won two tournaments. We hadn’t won a tournament in several years and it was nice to win two.”
Out of the 11 competitions Idaho competed in this year, including six in the fall, four in the spring and the Big Sky Championship, the Vandals took fifth or better in four of them. They finished in the top six in eight out of the 11. Kim, Oster or Strankman led the team in every competition, but Kim took over in the spring shooting the best score on the team in all four regular-season invitationals and the Big Sky Championship. Kim finished in the top five in three out of the five spring competitions.
This season was Johnson’s eighth as Idaho’s coach and she said it ranks as one of the best since she started coaching the Vandals. She said the 2009-2010 team she coached was ranked in the top 25 in the country at one point during the season.
“The team definitely improved their game a lot from last year to this year and then as the year went on we were playing very well coming out of the winter, and I feel good about a lot of things we did well this spring,” Johnson said.
Garrett Cabeza can be reached at [email protected]