Golf season for the Brandeis Judges was teed off last weekend at the Bowdoin College Invitational. After two days of play, Brandeis walked away in 10th place with a combined score of 663. This placed them 59 strokes behind first place Hamilton (604), 50 shots ahead of last place Colby (713), two shots ahead of Bates (665) and 18 behind Amherst (645). The first match was mixed message about the state of the team for Coach Bill Shipman.

Well it tells me that we have a very deep team. We have 6, 7 quality golfers but right now theyre not playing as well as they can. Theyre playing pretty well but not as well as they need to. Theyre wasting 3, 4, 5 shots per round for no good reason that could put us up into the next level of teams, golf Coach Bill Shipman explained.
Leading the Judges on the links was Alex Podell 09 with a 165, shooting 82 and 83 respectively. Rookie golfer Lee Bloom 10 tied Dan Shani 08, each shooting 166. Rounding out the team were Aaron Hattenbach 09 and Alex Botwick 10, each with 169. Shani had the best round on the team, shooting an 80 on the first day, but he experienced difficulties on the windier second day, shooting an 86.

Despite the slow start, Coach Shipman was reasonably optimistic or at least pragmatic about what needs to happen as he assessed the positives and negatives of the tournament performance. Its still early but I was pretty pleased with the consistency of the scores. Nobody blew up on the course and really lost it, there were a few bad holes but generally they played fairly consistently;

just wasted too many shots for no good reason. Wasnt that they were playing badly they just were making a few too many mistakes here and there.

Brandeis returns to action Sept. 20 as they head off to Chicopee, MA for the Elms College Invitational.