After the 2004 NCAA Championships in Opelika, Ala., she was the
first one on the 18th green to greet her teammates. It was of no
consequence she wasn’t out there competing. Melissa Martin
may not have played for the national champion women’s golf
team last season, but she was still an integral part of its
success. Attending as many tournaments as she possibly could,
Martin was always walking the links with the rest of her teammates,
constantly pushing them on through thick and thin. And come this
Friday, Martin will have made her long trek back onto the traveling
squad, and this time she’ll be out there competing as well.
Martin, a redshirt senior, and the rest of her Bruin teammates are
slated to compete in Palo Alto this Friday in the Stanford/Pepsi
Intercollegiates. The tournament, which spans three days, will be
held at Stanford Golf Course, which plays to a par of 72 and is
over 6,168 yards. For Martin, it will be her first collegiate
tournament since the 2003 NCAA Championships. But she’s not
likely to have butterflies. Continuously perfecting all the aspects
of her game, Martin is a veteran of 87 career collegiate rounds,
and along with team leader Charlotte Mayorkas, represents the
senior members of this year’s squad.
DROP IN THE RANKINGS: The Bruins may be
defending champions, but according to the latest rankings, they
have been surpassed as the best team. The title of No. 1 now
belongs to Duke, the team who held the top ranking for most of last
year. For the Bruins, the drop in the rankings to No. 3 comes a
week after they forfeited a seven-shot lead to Duke in a tournament
in Tennessee last week.
FRESHMEN POWER: Standout true freshman Amie
Cochran currently leads the team in scoring average. In her nine
rounds of competition thus far, Cochran is averaging 73.8 strokes
per round, holding nearly a one-shot advantage over senior
Charlotte Mayorkas. Freshman Vanessa Brockett, who has competed on
the traveling squad in the Bruins’ first three tournaments,
will be competing as an individual at Stanford.
PUTTING GREEN: Stanford Golf Course has been
redesigned since the Bruins saw it last. “Although changes
have been made to the course layout this season, we are excited to
see how we fare on the new design,” UCLA coach Carrie Forsyth
said.