April 10, 2009

Golf Team Looks to Rebound From Shaky Start to Season At Princeton Invitational

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Just two weeks removed from a shaky start to the season, the golf team will be back on the links looking to rebound from a 14th-place finish at the Towson Invitational. The Red will be joining a field of 14 in this weekend’s Princeton Invitational.
Cornell will have the last of the five tee-times, playing alongside Towson and Rutgers on Day 1 of two. Last weekend at Towson, Rutgers finished tied for 11th while the host team finished 15th, right behind Cornell’s 930 strokes with 931.
The Red’s playing partners are the only opponents that also played at the Towson Invitational. This will be the first opportunity for Cornell to see Connecticut, George Mason, Rider, St. Bonaventure, defending champion St. John’s and St. Josephs. More importantly, the Red will also get their first look at Columbia, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale.
The men on Cornell’s team are used to facing new opponents and new courses. Of Cornell’s five scoring golfers — junior Robert Cronheim, sophomores Dan Bosse and Ben Myer, and freshmen Alex Simson and Alex Lavin — only Cronheim played with the team last year.
Cronheim is also the only member of the team who has ever seen Springdale Golf Club, a par-71, 6390-yard course. The other four, however, are unfazed by the level of unfamiliarity.
“It doesn’t matter that only one guy has played there before,” Myer said. “We have practice rounds, and we’ve been playing at new places all season. It’s not a big deal at all.”
The bigger deal is that this will be the first chance for Cornell to see some of its Ivy League competition.
“We haven’t seen many of the Ivies, so it will be good to see them before champs,” Myer added.
With one match under its belt and only two weekends before the Ivy League Championships in Atlantic City, N.J., the Red will be looking to improve on its showing at Towson where Cronheim was the only golfer in the top-50 with his ninth-place finish.
“We learned a lot from our last time out, and we saw we needed to build on this Spring,” Myer said. “We’ve been working for two weeks to come out and play well this weekend at Princeton, and put on a good showing in our first Ivy test.”