The Iowa Class 3A girls golf state championships were contested at River Valley Golf Course in Adel this week, according to a story in the Des Moines Register, and the festivities featured a furious day-two rally in the team race and three playoff holes to decide the individual champion.
Clear Lake rallied from 12 shots back to beat Gilbert and win the team championship, and the school now can claim three team titles in girls golf, the others coming in 2010 and 2012.
But perhaps the biggest story of the day was an outrageous pin placement on the 18th green, which caused players to average quadruple bogey on the hole.
As evidenced in a tweet by a local TV station intern, Jake Brand, the players weren’t given much of a fair shake. Again, these are 3A high school golfers being presented with this challenge, not professionals.
According to Brand, the tournament took more than nine hours to play with groups averaging about 20 minutes on just the 18th green.
The individual title came down to the third playoff hole, between Newton’s Rylee Heryford and Gilbert’s Eden Lohrbach. The two-shot identical scores of 149 — both shot 75 on Thursday, then 74 on Friday — and Heryford emerged victorious after three playoff holes. She is the first Newton girls golfer to win an individual state title.
