Growing pains: Young Mount Si golf team looking strong for the long-term

Published 12:15 pm Thursday, April 26, 2012

“Progress is progress.”

So Olivia Doherty tells her teammate Paxton Richardson, watching as the junior’s right-leaning hits improved over the afternoon of April 18 at Mount Si Golf Course.

“I noticed she was hitting really great drives,” said Doherty, playing Interlake in Mount Si’s second flight. “I wanted her to be positive about it.”

In a young team handling the growing pains of competitive golf, both Doherty and Richardson are among the team’s future leaders.

“It’s great that we’re getting better,” Doherty said.

For such a young team, led by a junior, with no seniors, the 2012 season is shaping up surprisingly strong.

In just the last week, “We’ve gone from a group of individual golfers to a team that is working together,” head coach Brandon Proudfoot said. “They’re helping each other improve.”

Expectations remain high for the team’s two leaders, Danielle Burns and Tabitha Dorn, who co-medaled the April 16 match at Sammamish. The driven junior Burns, seventh-ranked player in KingCo, is nursing a wrist injury, but sitting out a match is unthinkable. She shot 48 on Wednesday, April 18, at home versus Interlake, and a 49 on Thursday against Liberty.

Dorn endured a rough patch Wednesday, with a 54, then got it back in gear with a 45 on Thursday. Overall, her game is really coming together. The sophomore has shaved six strokes off her average over last year.

Mount Si has two golf-experienced freshmen, and four others who are brand new to the game.

“We’ve got them hitting the ball,” Proudfoot said. “Now, we’re working on getting the ball in the hole. They’re doing really well, considering they’ve only been playing for five weeks.”

If Proudfoot can do a good job of building a love for the game, and promoting off-season play, by next year Mount Si can expect to field a truly strong girls squad.

“Now they’ve turned the corner, they’re taking it more seriously,” Proudfoot says. “They know what to focus on.”

“We started out rough, but we’re picking up speed,” said Burns.

Golf is an individual sport, but with team dynamics. Players like Burns, or Doherty, Mount Si’s number three player, know how to go it alone. But they, like the rest of the Mount Si squad, enjoy the interplay with other girls.

“You have somebody to support you, and you’re there to support them,” says Burns.

“We all just need to look for each other,” says Doherty.

This is Doherty’s first year on a competitive team. Her father Scott got her involved in the sport, and she competed in tournaments last summer. Aiming at consistent scoring, the freshman has a goal of breaking 50 strokes. She shot 53s in both of last week’s matches.

Junior Cecelia Dixon is Mount Si’s fifth-mark player, and she’s also a newcomer to competitive play.

She was encouraged by her dad to play the sports, and she has friends on the team.

“It’s been a good experience,” said Doherty, who is working on improving her scores and drives.

The no. 2 golfer, Dorn, ranked 13th in league, was pushing herself because she knows this home course, playing it with family members including her sister Julia, a 2011 varsity leader. She said she has had more patience this year, “because I know the game that much more.”

“Just take every shot,” Dorn says, thinking about her game. “Make sure every shot counts.”

Pictured below: Olivia Doherty, Danielle Burns, Paxton Richardson.