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By Chris Lang
FREDERICKSBURG — No matter what happens in the championship flight final on Wednesday morning, history will be made at the 75th Virginia State Golf Association Women’s State Team Matches.
Tuesday at Fredericksburg Country Club, Portsmouth’s Bide-A-Wee Golf Club and Alexandria’s Mount Vernon Country Club won semifinal matches, setting up a matchup between the two clubs in Wednesday’s final.
Should Mount Vernon win, it would claim its 15th title in the event and tie it with the Country Club of Virginia and Army Navy Country Club for the most wins in event history. Bide-A-Wee is seeking its first win the event.
“We’re really excited to be in the final again,” Mount Vernon captain Joan Gardner said. “We know a few of the Bide-A-Wee ladies and we’re meeting some of the others. It will be an interesting match. We just need to play our own game, and hopefully that’s enough to win some points here or there.”
Due to forecasted inclement weather on Wednesday afternoon, the format of the event was changed. Stroke-play qualifying—scheduled for Tuesday—was canceled, meaning clubs were flighted by Handicap Index. Originally expected to conclude on Thursday, the event’s final matches will begin at 9 a.m. Wednesday with a shotgun start in hopes of beating the severe weather expected from the remnants of Hurricane Ida.
In the Women’s State Team Matches, each club features three two-person sides. Each match is played to its conclusion as 18 points are available—one for each hole. Sides get a half-point each if the hole is tied.
Mount Vernon, which lost by a point in last year’s final against CCV, returned to the championship match with a 30-24 win over top-seeded Stonehenge Golf & Country Club of Richmond.
Mount Vernon won all three matches against Stonehenge. Gardner and Debbie Simpson defeated Peggy Freeman and Heather Choe 9½-8½; Shawn McCullough and Diane Willkens topped Helen Im and Kyoung Lee 10-8; and Linda DiVall and Sarah Alvarez beat Kristine Rohrbaugh and Gwen Foddrell 10½-7½.
The highlight for Mount Vernon on Tuesday was Willkens’ hole in one on the par-3 8th hole.
“Diane was a substitute—she was last year too—when our wonderful team member Kim Franks got called into service again with helping with some of the Afghan refugees,” Gardner said. “Last minute, Kim was out, Diane was in. So it’s doubly exciting for her to have a hole in one. Apparently, they won the next four holes after that, so it gave them some real momentum.”
Bide-A-Wee and CCV played a tight match, with the Portsmouth club earning the winning points in the final of the three matches between the two. CCV’s Natalie Easterly and Mary Parsley nipped Laura Landon and Gigi Smith 9½-8½ in the first match, and Lindsay Wortham and Kit Bredrup split the 18 points 9-9 with Cyndi Carlson and Alice Striffler.
But a 50-foot birdie putt from captain Pam Fisher on the 16th hole in the final match proved crucial as Fisher and Mallory Hetzel defeated Liza Lewis and Brenda Baril 11-7.
“(Hetzel) had been telling me all day to hit this number, that number, so that helped,” Fisher said. “I was looking uphill at the putt, and I just gave it a good stroke and it fell right in.”
“It was closer than the score indicated,” Hetzel said. “It was kind of nip and tuck. We grinded it out.”
Mount Vernon won has this event nine times since 2008. The last club other than Mount Vernon or CCV to win the title? Portsmouth club Elizabeth Manor Golf & Country Club in 2011. Bide-A-Wee hopes to join that list on Wednesday.
“It’s exciting,” Hetzel said. “I feel like we have a good group too. (CCV) had won it a bunch. But we felt like if we played our best, we’d have a chance, and that’s the way it worked out.”
Added Fisher: “We’re very comfortable with each other. We’ve played a lot of golf together over the years, and we said, hey, why not us? We like to have fun on and off the golf course. We’re pretty relaxed. We just try to get the job done.”
Lang is the VSGA’s manager of media and communications.