By Stephen Smoot
“It’s been a good season so far,” reports Mike Eye, Pendleton County head golf coach.
On Aug. 18 at Valley View, nine golfers combined for a score of 181 in competition with Moorefield, Petersburg, and Washington. Landon Davis and Dylan Eye both placed in the top 10.
Not long after in a match with teams from Tucker County and Notre Dame, the Wildcats had four top 10 finishers. Davis scored a 40, Eye a 42, Jake Thompson a 48 and Hayden Kimble a 52.
Coach Eye explained that the team “got a hot start and things have settled a little bit.” He went on to add that “our first match, everyone was firing on all cylinders. Everyone is shaking out close to where we thought they’d be.”
The team has a varsity squad of six players. Eye shared that his one and two golfers are in tight competition, as well as his third and fourth. Fifth and sixth are pretty close as well. As he described, competition among teammates is spirited, but never breaks team camaraderie. “They’re not out there to outdo each other,” the coach noted.
Rankings are objectively determined by a national high school golf website called iwanamaker, which covers West Virginia high school action.
The coaching staff this year added a new wrinkle to the system to enhance competitiveness. The seventh ranked player on the team once per week can pose a nine-hole challenge to the sixth place player for their spot on varsity.
One of the reasons why the team “settled a bit” after the first week lay in commitments by some of the players that pulled them away from the links. After being “off our rhythm,” for a time, the commitments are past and “everybody is here for the duration.”
As opposed to football where every regular season game has consequence, golf season represents two months of preparing one’s game for the matches that truly matter. “It all comes down to the regional tournament,” stated coach Eye. “You have to do well on that day. It doesn’t matter if you were number one all season.”
The challenge lies in each team reaching “its peak at the right moment.”
The coach had praise for how his team has worked to prepare for that moment. “I’m there seven days a week, even when we don’t have practice. I help to clean the driving range, picking up balls,” he stated. “They give us a lot of privileges, so I help when I can.”
One of the key privileges lies in free access to the course as long as the players walk. On days when the team has no practice and no game, yet the course is open, players will come on their own time to hone their games. “The bare minimum, just coming to practices and play is not enough to improve,” Eye commented.
“I’ve seen all of them out there on our so-called days off. It’s making a difference,” stated the coach, who added that it also shows their love of the sport.
The ultimate goal of the squad lies in developing the kind of consistency it takes to prevail in the regionals with a trip to Wheeling as a very attainable prize.
For a squad finding its legs only a few years ago, that represents tremendous progress.
