Montana set to compete at Big Sky Championship

The Montana women's golf team, coming off its best performance of the spring, will compete next week at the three-day Big Sky Conference Championship in Molalla, Ore.

The tournament, which will be played Monday through Wednesday, with 18 holes each day, will be held at the Arrowhead Golf Club.

The Grizzlies are coming off rounds of 303 and 299, the latter the team's best score in more than two years, at the Bobcat Spring Invitational.

That tournament, where Montana finished eighth out of 11 teams, was played at the relatively forgiving Golf Club of Estrella in Goodyear, Ariz., a wide-open desert course.

Next week's championship will be played on a course that was built into an old-growth forest, with rolling hills and the Molalla River and Wrights Creek nearby.

"The biggest difference between what we just played and what we're going to is tee shots have to be in play," said coach Kris Nord. "You have to see to your specific target and hit to it.

"If you're off line at all, you're going to have to take your medicine and play for a miraculous par or a good bogey. We just need to take the mindset of playing real positive golf. If you have a bump in the road, let it go and go to the next hole."

Nord will compete with the same lineup he had in Arizona earlier this week: seniors Teigan Avery and Faith D'Ortenzio, junior Kylie Esh, sophomore Jessica Ponce and freshman Meredith Boos.

Esh led Montana at Estrella, shooting rounds of 72 and 74 to tie for 12th. Ponce (77-74) and Avery (76-78) also shot two rounds in the 70s. Boos closed the tournament with a second-round 73.

Avery will be playing in her fourth Big Sky Championship. Her best finish came in 2018, when she shot rounds of 75, 77 and 74 to tie for 20th.

D'Ortenzio will be playing in her third, Esh her second. Esh led Montana at the most recent Big Sky Championship, in 2019. She shot rounds of 74, 80 and 73 to tie for 24th.

Montana will be trying to improve upon its recent history at the Big Sky Championship. The team has not finished higher than seventh since 2014-15.

"We were in this position in tennis 20 years ago, where we just wanted to be in contention," said Nord. "We have to get ourselves in contention more consistently, which would be a top three or four finish. Then take it to the next step. That's the progression.

"Our goal is to shoot a 290. That's a high bar, but if you don't have that high goal, we shouldn't be getting on the airplane on Saturday. We have a huge upside. It's just whether we can get everybody clicking all three days. The challenge is the entire conference is better."

In the latest Golfstat rankings, Montana comes in at No. 213, which has the Grizzlies ranked ninth out of 11 teams in the league.

Sacramento State (101), Northern Arizona (116) and Idaho (130) all have rankings in the top 130. Weber State (152), Southern Utah (168) and Portland State (175) rank in the top 175.

The next five teams all rank between 202nd (Northern Colorado) and 222nd (Montana State).

The tournament is likely to be the end of the road as Grizzlies, at least as student-athletes, for Avery and D'Ortenzio.

Avery has competed in 33 events over the last five years. Her career scoring average of 79.81 ranks just outside of the top 10 in program history. D'Ortenzio has a career scoring average of 80.30 over 24 events.

They were both in the program, Avery as a rising sophomore, D'Ortenzio as an incoming freshman, when Nord took over the program on an interim basis in August 2017, then permanently a few months later.

"They've been good leaders in their own way, Teigan a little more vocal than Faith, Faith a little more by action, but they've been good teammates for the younger kids," said Nord. "They've been very good for me, just buying into the things I did differently."

For Avery, it's been quite the journey. There is a reason she was named the 2019 GoGriz.com Person of the Year.

"With what Teigan's been through, I'm just proud she's still playing," said Nord. "She's hung in there. I just hope she has a good finish.

"She's already had a nice finish in my mind. No matter what happens in Portland, I'm really proud of her."

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Players Mentioned

Teigan Avery

Meredith Boos

Faith D'Ortenzio

Kylie Esh

Jessica Ponce

University of Montana Athletics