Wind. It can infantilize professional golfers and turn amateurs embryonic.
It's worse than water. Playing into a stream or lake? Nothing more than a penalty stroke. Wind is permanent, insidious. It dances with the ball, suffocates it, tosses it aside. Once the ball gets airborne, there's no going back.
Forty mile-per-hour gusts in Greensboro took the field at the Bryan National Collegiate for a joyride, including the North Carolina women's golf team. Sunday's blustery final round saw an average score a nudge above 80. Duke would hold on for an emphatic 21-stroke win, and North Carolina would finish 12th.
But sophomore Elizabeth Mallett proved stiffer than the wind. She mustered a final-round 75, earning an eighth-place finish as UNC's top individual finisher and her second top-10 of 2013-14.
While the rest of the field, and even her teammates, faltered amid unenviable conditions, Mallett found enviable consistency. She overcame four bogeys on her first 11 holes and finished her round with eight consecutive pars. She even added a birdie on eight, statistically the sixth-most difficult hole Sunday at Bryan Park Golf Course. Mallett finished just six strokes behind Duke's Celine Boutier, whose even-par finish represented the lowest total of 93 wind-battered players.
Perhaps it was because she's accustomed to swirling winds from growing up in Sutton Coldfield, England. Perhaps it was because she's the team's best player at the moment, owner of UNC's only top-10 individual finishes of the season and the Tar Heels' best scoring average.
But Mallett played with a steadiness that belies her sophomore status. She carded one-over-par and two-over-par rounds Friday and Saturday, respectively, with two double bogies inflating her otherwise taut performance. She received little support in the team portion of the tournament: Samantha Marks, competing as an individual and therefore independent of the team competition, finished tied for 33rd. UNC's second-best team contributor, junior Katherine Perry, finished tied for 42nd.
There was water, too. Eight holes nuzzle up to Lake Townsend at Bryan Park, one of the country's best and most formidable public courses. It didn't look kindly upon UNC, which looked very much the part of a team in transition. The Tar Heels, still trying to cajole its young talent to fill an absence of senior leadership, have finished no higher than sixth in a 2013-14 team event. Mallet's seventh-place finish at the Darius Rucker Intercollegiate in early March stands as the team's top individual performance.
It was not a weekend for the faint of stiff breezes or gaudy scorecards. Save for Elizabeth Mallett, Bryan Park left the Tar Heels twisting in the wind.
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