Women’s golf dominates nine-team ?eld for ACC Championship

GREENSBORO — The gentle breeze that blew through Sedgefield Country Club on Sunday proved to be the toughest competition for the North Carolina women’s golf team.

The Tar Heels cruised to their first ACC Championship since 1992, outdistancing their closest competitor, Duke, by 24 strokes.

Junior Allie White led the way for the Tar Heels, finishing all alone in second place with a score of 215, 2-over-par for the three-day event.

She made her final birdie of the day after getting up and down out of the sand trap on the 15th hole.

“Golf is just one of those games where sometimes it all lines up and sometimes it doesn’t,” White said. “For everyone else it probably didn’t — but for us it did.”

White had her driver right on line all week, regularly smashing drives in the fairway past her opponents. Around the greens, as UNC coach Jan Mann had advised, she left her wedge in the bag and opted to use the putter as often as possible.

Catherine O’Donnell, also a junior, finished the tournament at 4-over, a score good enough for third place overall. But O’Donnell didn’t even realize she was on the leaderboard.

“Well I didn’t play very well today, or as well as I thought I should have,” O’Donnell said. “I wasn’t expecting a high finish, but I played well yesterday, so that helped me out today.”

O’Donnell posted her best score of the season on Saturday with a 4-under, 67.

Four of the five Tar Heels in the field finished in the top ten, including Katherine Perry in sixth place and Casey Grice tied for seventh.

“To be honest with you I did not think we would win it by this large of a margin because we’ve got some great teams in the ACC and they always perform well,” Mann said. “For them to perform the way they did was pretty special.”

In the nine-team field at Sedgefield’s 6,185-yard par-71 track, five teams are ranked in the top 25. No. 5 Duke, No. 8 Virginia and No. 16 Wake Forest rounded out the top four while UNC entered the weekend at No. 22.

Sedgefield is the host of the PGA’s Wyndham Championship, formerly known as the Greater Greensboro Open.

The Tar Heels came in to the final round leading by 24 strokes. White dominated from the start, carding an opening-round 66 and followed it with a 74 for first-place tie with Wake Forest’s Cheyenne Woods before the start of the final round. Woods won the event overall with a score of 5-under-par.

The 5-under opening round for White was her best score of the year. O’Donnell posted the lowest score of the day in the second round with a 4-under-par 67 moving her to even par for the tournament and tied for third place overall.

Perry started the final round just two strokes behind O’Donnell and alone in fifth place as the Tar Heels took three of the top five spots on the leaderboard Sunday morning.

The win is the second ACC championship for the Tar Heels in the 21-year history of the event. The Tar Heels have finished runner-up five times previously. Duke has won the event a record 16 times including a streak of 12 in a row from 1996-2008. Last year, UNC finished fifth in the event, 37 strokes out of first place.

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