“There’s always a putt we could have made or a tee shot that we could have hit straighter,” says senior Ryan Svenson in reflection of the 2015-2016 boys golf season.
In general, the season has drawn many mixed reactions from a large number of the team’s players. Senior Nick Kaye states how the season went past more or less as expected. Many newer, younger players had stepped into the starting line up for the varsity team, and Kaye credits them for having carried out an impressive job in their new roles on the team.
This team amounted a 4-8 PAL-Bay record, matching their previous season’s record. “Even though we lost a majority of our matches, I feel like we made some huge steps as the season went on,” says Kaye.
Both Svenson and Kaye report having to set a new starting lineup due to a few of their senior starters deciding to sit out this season, including two of their best players on the team. “I have no hard feelings toward them at all, and I’m actually glad it worked out that way because I was able to push myself harder and fight to hold that spot in the starting six,” says Svenson.
Kaye adds, “There were changes [we had to make to the lineup this season] … we had freshmen and sophomores who did not have a lot of experience playing in the matches, but they stepped up and played like veterans and really helped our teams.”
Senior Carter Walling and CCS-qualifier notes the handful of close matches the team faced this season.
“It was a learning year for most of the guys as they all had some good days and bad days and the league this year was really good and our team just could not put together enough solid scores to win most of the time. We had a lot of improvements from the underclassmen, as you could tell they really wanted to get better and were consistently shooting better scores and making it into the starting line up,” says Walling.
“In regards to myself i started the season terribly playing some of the worst golf in a long time,” says Walling, who was one of the three CCS-qualifiers from last year’s team. “But towards the end of the season my game really started to come around and got back up in the standings to one of the top players in the league.”
Especially against Woodside and Burlingame, the team reflects on the tight score in each of the contests. “We had the chance to beat Woodside each time we played them and we matched up very even with them,” says Kaye. “However we lost by five strokes or less each time we played them.”
Specifically, the team’s matchup against Burlingame was a critical league win, for it guaranteed Aragon to stay in the Bay division next year.
“Our lowest score as a team was in the 220s, and luckily it was against Burlingame. If we didn’t shoot that, we would have taken yet another loss,” says Svenson.
All in all, despite the team’s performance this season, they look forward to implementing more improvement in the future.
