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MELBOURNE, Fla. – Back home in Stillwater, Oklahoma, this week, Greg Robertson will talk to his Oklahoma State team about approaching a closing stretch of holes as a tour player would. Cowgirl alum Caroline Masson, an LPGA winner and Solheim Cup veteran, put that idea in his head.
Masson is based on the Central Florida coast and spent part of her Valentine’s Day watching her old team compete at the Columbia Classic at Duran Golf Club. Oklahoma State took the lead early in the day but ultimately finished third, four shots behind champion Virginia Tech, after going 8 over on No. 18, a long par 4 that doglegs left around water.
“We’ve got a lot that we’ll talk about when we get home,” Robertson said, “but a good learning experience with that pin placement, with the wind, everything about the hole. Probably didn’t play that how we should have. And that just comes with a little bit of discipline and patience.”
Robertson would rather give that lesson now than in another three months, when Oklahoma State, as the returning NCAA runners-up, will be looking to make another championship run. The team was undefeated in the fall and started the Columbia Classic as the No. 2-ranked team in the Golfweek/Sagarin Rankings.
Just as Robertson hopes his team learns the hard lessons early, he also hopes that by the time the postseason rolls around, the players who are competing the best have revealed themselves. Oklahoma State’s morphing roster (the team already lost Maja Stark, last season’s leading scorer, to pro golf) is the biggest variable in the Cowgirls’ spring story.
The day after Oklahoma State’s spring opener, last month’s Rapsodo Match in the Desert, leading scorer Caley McGinty broke the news she’d be entering the transfer portal. McGinty, an Englishwoman who originally signed with Robertson in 2019 while he was at Kent State and this fall transferred to Oklahoma State, is now taking online classes and is no longer in Stillwater.
“We wish her nothing but the best moving forward,” Robertson said.
The Curtis Cupper and the No. 16-ranked amateur in the world won twice in the fall and carried a 68.6 scoring average, the lowest on the team by nearly a stroke. But Robertson is quick to point out that five of his remaining players have all won at least one college tournament.
“Losing Caley, she was a great player certainly, but we still have a group that can be competitive,” he said.
Upperclassmen Lianna Bailey, Hailey Jones and Han-Hsuan Yu are all candidates to fill the open spot.
“Those are the three that were kind of on the outside in the fall looking in, but Lianna is a two-time college winner, Hailey won as an individual this fall so they’re good players,” Robertson said.
Sophomore Maddison Hinson-Tolchard just won the individual title at the Rapsodo event, and at the Columbia Classic, junior Isabella Fierro broke a two-year college golf winless drought with a two-shot victory at 2 under. Fierro won her first college title at the 2019 Betsy Rawls Longhorn Invitational, her third start with the team. She hasn’t won since but posted seven top-10 finishes last season including two runner-up finishes. This time last year, she missed the first two starts of the spring battling a wrist injury.
“She’s been nothing but top 5s, top 10s the last two years so this was a long time coming,” Robertson said.
Fierro looked at the tough conditions on the closing day, felt thankful that at least the sun was out and buckled in. She credited a calm mental state, something that’s been a struggle lately. You can’t push harder to get into the winner’s circle, she reasoned, or change what you’re doing.
The same goes for filling the shoes of an absent teammate.
“It was sad for us but we have great leaders on the team,” Fierro said of watching both Stark and McGinty move on, “we have a lot of good perspective and a lot of good personalities on the team. It’s not just about one leader it’s about every person, even the ones that don’t make the lineup.”
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