CLARKSVILLE, TN (CLARKSVILLE NOW) – Postseason play is here, and the Austin Peay women’s golf team is set to compete in their first-ever A-SUN conference tournament.
The Govs have been lethal on the greens throughout the 2022-23 season. Since the beginning of the year, Austin Peay women’s golf has won four out of the nine tournaments they’ve competed in.
Three of their wins have come in the past five tournaments, so the Govs are riding a hot streak.
Coach Jesscia Combs has built the program into the competitors they are today since being hired during the 2019 season. Austin Peay is hunting for their second consecutive conference tournament after being crowned conference champions in the OVC during the 2021 season.
Combs joined the Clarksville Now “Your Week, Your Sports” podcast recently to discuss expectations for the upcoming tournament, the course’s layout and everything the program has accomplished the past two seasons.
About the course
Combs said she is all too familiar with the Hampton Cove golf course where the conference tournament will be held.
“I’ve played the course a couple of times when I was a student-athlete at Austin Peay,” Combs said. “Our conference championship was held there for a couple of years, and then we were there for the OVC Championship just a few years ago. We’ve played it once this spring, so all of the girls have played it at this point and it’s going to be fun.
“It can be a difficult course. Especially … with some of the wind. There’s some water out there too, but I have them tend to focus on where we want to hit it, not where we don’t want to hit it. There’s a barn on hole 5, so that’s kind of a fun obstacle to avoid.”
Combs said the girls are feeling great heading into the weekend. She admitted it’s taken a few years to get the right players on the team – players who want to be there, that are driven and dedicated.
“I think that you can see that from the success we’ve had for the past several years that the right girls are on the right team. To touch on our seventh-place finish in the fall, we actually faced our toughest competition that we saw. And we still shot our third best team score in program history, so it was still a solid tournament even though we finished seventh out of 14 teams.”
Lessons learned
“I expect the course to play a little differently than it did this spring, just because the greens will be quicker, and the fairway will be more grown in. So, I’d like to see us take the mistakes we made earlier this spring and correct those.
“Our first round this spring was at Hampton Cove, and we did not play our best. I think that it was our worst round this spring. Our second and third round we had a great turnaround, the girls’ played exactly how they needed to. I’m hoping to see more like that second and third round score. Then, I’m hoping for us to improve on our putting as well.”
The Austin Peay women’s golf team will begin teeing off at the A-SUN conference tournament on Sunday, April 16.
MORE: Hear the full interview on “Your Week, Your Sports” and find archived episodes on Soundcloud and Apple Podcasts. New episodes are uploaded every Tuesday.