After more than three months without a competition, the Blue Devils will kick off the spring season by heading west.
No. 3 Duke will compete for the first time this spring at the Northrop Grumman Challenge in Palos Verdes, Calif. The tournament will be played at the Palos Verdes Golf Club and is scheduled to start Sunday and conclude Tuesday.
The Blue Devils—who finished in the top five at each of their fall tournaments—will be taking on a stacked field in the 54-hole event. Seven of the top eight teams in the country—including No. 1 and two-time defending champions UCLA—are in the field, making for an exciting event in southern California.
“[We’re] really excited,” head coach Dan Brooks said. “We’re coming out of a tough winter of weather. We managed to get our rounds in, and I think we’ve handled it pretty well. We practiced as well as we could. We’re ready to go.”
The Blue Devils will likely look to their two seniors—Alejandra Cangrejo and Laetitia Beck—for guidance because of the long trip and the inevitable rust that comes with three months away from competitive golf.
Beck was the model of consistency in the fall, accumulating two top-five finishes and another top-10 in her four starts. By contrast, Cangrejo struggled, failing to crack the top-15 in each of her three starts.
After failing to break 80 at the Tar Heel Invitational—a tournament the Blue Devils won by 11 strokes—the Colombian lost her spot in the lineup for Duke’s final fall tournament. Now back in the lineup, she will be looking to start the spring season on a high note and give the Blue Devils a second veteran leader.
“I think she did a little bit of work during the winter,” Brooks said. “She was back in Colombia and the weather was pretty good. She’s been hitting it pretty well in our qualifiers. I think she’s good to go.”
Luckily for Duke, even when Cangrejo was struggling, the Blue Devil underclassmen rose to the occasion.
Sophomore Celine Boutier was Duke’s only golfer other than Beck to play in all four tournaments, racking up two top-10 finishes and another top-20. The Frenchwoman has played all over the world and showed much more maturity on the course by scoring well even when she was not playing her best.
Boutier’s solid fall was overshadowed by the emergence of freshman Yu Liu. Liu led the Blue Devils with a 71.67 scoring average and finished in the top-10 in each of her three starts. She finished second at Duke’s final tournament of the fall and gives the Blue Devils yet another seasoned player in the lineup.
“She continues to hit the ball really hard and hits it a long ways,” Brooks said. “She’s a very, very hard worker. She’s down there at night. She’s walked up from our varsity area in the dark almost every day, so she puts in a lot of time. She’s not afraid of hard work.”
Rounding out Duke’s lineup this week is Liu’s fellow freshman Esther Lee. Lee—a highly-touted prospect coming out of high school—will be returning to her home state and making just her second appearance in the lineup as a Blue Devil after struggling in qualifying rounds for much of the fall. She will look to solidify her spot in the lineup with a good performance this week after earning a top-20 finish in her first start.
“Esther has stepped up a little bit,” Brooks said. “She’s been working pretty hard and we’re excited to have her in the lineup.”
The Blue Devils—who will not compete again until March 7 after the event—have the luxury of knowing they will have a lineup capable of winning every tournament in which they tee it up this spring.
However, they will have to contend with a daunting series of golf courses to reach their goals—starting with a par-71, 6,017-yard course this week that will test the nation’s best.
“There’s a lot of elevation change,” Brooks said. “On one par three, there’s about three clubs worth of descent down to the green. You’re actually going to hit three clubs less than you would from that yardage. It’s a great golf course—you’ve got to think all the way around.”
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