Credit to Taylor Griffin

Senior Mackenzie Hill prepares for her first hole.

One of the biggest things that people look forward to during their season is playing in their home facilities. The team knows where they are playing and have learned it well. But for the FHN girls golf team, they don’t get to experience those advantages after losing the home course they’ve had for 12 years.

“When you are playing a home match, that is your advantage over other teams,” assistant coach Lexi Rupp said. “We just don’t have somewhere consistent to play.”

The Knights were stationed at the Links of Dardenne for more than a decade and never experienced any issues. But then the course went under new management and could not host girls golf matches. They have been fortunate enough to still be able to get some practice at the Pheasant Run Golf Course and Cave Springs Driving Range, but it doesn’t meet the standard of what a usual high school course is.

“[Pheasant Run] has a lot of par 3s and par 4s,” senior Addyson Brenner said. “A lot of the courses we play at are par 4s and par 5s and we have to use our drivers which we can’t use and practice with at Pheasant Run.”

This affected many events they held, but more specifically, Senior Night, which many of the senior athletes had waited for their whole high school career. Most sports get the luxury of hosting it at a home site, whereas the FHN girls golf team did not. Even a course that
is 20 minutes away can still be close for golf and an easy drive for families and athletes, but this year the Knights hosted their senior night match in Warrenton, Missouri, 40 miles away, at the Warrenton Golf Course.

“It was definitely a disadvantage, and we felt bad for the parents because they had to get all the way out there,” senior golfer Olivia Graeser said. “But ultimately it didn’t affect us too much, because we don’t have a home course anyways.”

Although there has been a lot of disappointment, having no course did allow the Knights to explore different courses with pars. The Knights played a total of 15 matches and played at 11 different courses this season which brought them advantages over other teams like getting the experience of playing at numerous courses and learning how to adapt to different playing surfaces.

“I think that playing at all of these different courses is good for a lot of us and we get to play on a lot of new courses,” Brenner said.