Boys and girls golf: Benet, Naperville North beat the weather, field
Nobody wanted to see Tuesday's 17th annual Vern McGonagle Memorial Championship rained out.
Not with the opportunity to play on the Naperville Country Club course at stake.
"It's an awesome course," Benet senior Jack Driscoll said. "This is my favorite course in the area. Whenever we play this tournament I'm always really happy. It's a great course."
But when storms rolled through the area, it looked like the tournament might have to be canceled.
"We were talking before the round, if we play I'm shocked. But I'm really glad we got it in. It turned out to be an awesome day," Driscoll said.
And then there might have been a little extra incentive also.
"We had to get out of seventh and eighth periods (to get to the tournament)," Naperville North senior Emma Lin said with a laugh, "so a lot of us were really worried because we didn't do our homework for seventh and eighth. But then it all worked out."
The Redwings boys and Huskies girls made the most of the opportunity, winning the team championship at what is essentially the Naperville city tournament. With the day shortened to nine holes due to the weather, Benet's boys shot a 160 for a narrow win. Waubonsie Valley finished second at 163, Neuqua Valley third at 165 and Metea Valley fourth at 166.
"We're hoping to make another good state run, just like last year," Driscoll said, noting the Redwings' sixth-place finish in Class 2A in 2018. "We feel pretty good about our chances."
Naperville North won the girls title with a 168, beating second-place Naperville Central by 14 strokes.
"It was a little rough. Any day it's raining I don't go in with the right mindset, but we were all able to pick it up, play a little better in the end. It is nine holes, so it's a little hard to recover from bad shots and bad holes," Lin said.
Lin won the girls individual championship, shooting a 41 to tie teammate Emma Kirvan, then winning the tiebreaker on the ninth hole.
The 37 Waubonsie Valley's Jacob Fritz shot won the boys individual championship by a stroke over Benet's Quinn Shanley. Driscoll was third with a 39.
Driscoll's round was a little unusual. He sandwiched a triple bogey around 8 pars.
"I was playing pretty well going into it," he said. "I hit two pretty good shots on the hole, so I just kind of kept going with the rest of the round as it was. I was hitting it OK."