It's easy to hide under a cloak of obscurity when you're a freshman stepping into a national championship program, even if you're a highly-touted junior. It becomes a bit more complicated when you win your first college tournament. And when you're named National Player of the Year in your first two campaigns and you're the leader of a Blue Devil dynasty-that is, when you're Amanda Blumenherst-you couldn't be further from the underdog.
You're the one the field is chasing.
Blumenherst and Duke seem to wear a target on their backs wherever they play now, but it is most evident in the NCAA Championship this week at the University of New Mexico Golf Course in Albuquerque, N.M., where the Blue Devils are gunning for their unprecedented fourth straight national title.
"At this level, all the other teams are really stepping up their game because they want to beat us. They want to beat Duke, and they want to win nationals," Blumenherst said. "Cruising into the tournament is not going to work.
"Coach [Dan Brooks] will say that when we go to a tournament, you see team that might not be ranked in the top five shoot really low, because they played with us today and they wanted to beat us. They came after us, and they played their best."
As much as the entire Blue Devil squad deals with the pressure of being the weekly favorite, it's even more acute for Blumenherst, the country's top golfer. It began in earnest, when she won the Mason Rudolph Classic in September 2005, and has progressed to the current point, when spectators ask what's wrong when she doesn't win.
So when teams come out and try to dethrone Duke, individuals do the same with Blumenherst. That strain hasn't necessarily caught up with the junior-she won four tournaments this year, to add to her seven of the previous two campaigns-but she nevertheless felt the strain.
"Everyone wants to beat the person who's on top and the team that's on top," she said. "It's the underdog mentality. I definitely feel it."
Although the team's leader avoided a lapse, the pressure might have weighed on the dynasty-in-the-making this year.
In the spring season, Duke has managed to retain its No. 1 ranking despite winning just two tournaments, two fewer than its 2007 spring total. Still, Brooks was pleased with his team's effort in the latter portion of the spring and has kept the Blue Devils on track by instilling some of the relaxed attitude of another particularly successful golfer with a mantle of trophies: Jack Nicklaus.
"I tell them, 'Stay patient. Stay focused. Get good rest. And keep it in perspective,'" Brooks said. "We're doing a really cool thing, playing for a fourth. But really all we're doing is, we're just playing golf.. We're lucky to be able to play this beautiful game. We have to let the results unfold. It's important that you don't consider anything more important than it actually is."
Blumenherst, for one, credits any sort of struggles to a series of tweaks to every player's game. Now, almost all of the kinks are worked out and the Blue Devils seem primed to reverse what she called "not-the-greatest spring."
"We're a developmental program," Brooks said. "This seems kind of crazy when you're trying to win national championships, but I think you have to. You have to be progressing. You can talk psychology all you want, but there's physics to the game. Great psychology will never overcome poor physics. We're always making sure it's going-not major things, but keeping it all going."
The careful balance of psychology and physics will combust some teams in the NCAA Championship this week. But for one, it will define the recipe for glory. And the three-time defending champions can only hope that the winning formula will result in an even bigger target when they walk off the 18th green for the last time this season.
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