After a dominant 2023-24 campaign, the No. 19 Taylor Trojans women’s golf team has returned to peak form to start the 2024 fall season.
In their first two invitationals, the Trojans have taken first place at the Battle at Brookwood in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the Players Club Invitational in Yorktown, Ind.
Head coach Lorne Oke called the beginning of the season a “really good start.”
“We knew coming in that our women would play very well,” Oke said. “We had reasonably high expectations. But you still have to go out and prove it.”
In both events, the Trojans got a chance to face off against multiple Crossroads League opponents and outplayed all of them.
In the Battle at Brookwood, Taylor won by an 81-point margin over the Huntington Foresters and had the top seven individual finishers in the event, only separated by 13 strokes between them.
Their second performance was just as strong, a 49-point win over Grace College at the Players Club Invitational, capitalized by claiming the top three finishers and ending with six golfers in the top 15.
The Trojans roster runs deep with a strong mix of upperclassmen and freshmen, highlighted by juniors Shayne Lim and Margarita Garrido.
Garrido opened the year with some of the best performances of her college career. Through two events, she tied for first place with Lim in Fort Wayne and won first place outright in Yorktown.
“I’m focusing better on the course and playing more consistently so that’s fun for me,” Garrido said. “It’s really exciting to look forward to the rest of the season because I have had such a good start.”
Taylor’s NAIA All-American Lim hasn’t lost a step either. After finishing as the eighth-best golfer in the NAIA last season, she returned to form with a first-place and third-place finish to start the season.
Freshman Elanor Schuitema has also leaped onto the scene, taking fourth in her first collegiate event, before finishing just five strokes behind Garrido for second place at the Player’s Club Invite.
Despite golf’s individual nature, the team continues to push work with each other in the smallest ways to help support each other in a mental-centric sport.
“(We get better) by encouraging each other and competing against each other in practice,” Garrido said. “We really try to push each other to improve.”
This is the second season of the NAIA implementing the SPIKEMARK statistical platform, which provides a heftier weight to rankings. Teams that finish in the top 20 by the end of the season have the ability to still enter the NAIA National Championships if they rank high enough, so that designation next to a college is more than just a number.
The third event of their season came on Sept. 23 and 24. The Trojans traveled down to Florida and took eighth out of 16 teams, finishing above rival No. 13 Indiana Wesleyan. Lim continued her strong season with a seventh-place finish, while Schuitema continued her stellar freshman season with an individual place of eleventh.
The rest of the fall season is highlighted by three challenging events, one of which is the Butler Invitational which takes place from the last day of September to Oct. 1 and will pit Taylor against NCAA colleges.
