Capers Austin Legge, Ryan Collins, Max Altznauer and Lauren Schonewolf combined to lead their team to its first Class B State Championship since 2007 on Saturday, Oct. 10. Cape bested second-place finishers Old Town by 12 strokes, 322-334.
Legge shot a 78 on the day. Collins and Altznauer both shot 81, and Schonewolf turned in an 82. Fifth man Bryce Hewitt scored 86.
Cape head coach Chris Whitney remarked on two of his athletes’ performances: “Austin Legge, who’s a freshman, actually shot the lowest score on the team,” said Whitney. “He’s a really smart kid; mentally, he’s just really tough, to where I think he usually plays better when the light’s shined upon him.
“He got a little nervous at the end,” Whitney said of Legge. “He was just sailing right along, and I think he got a little tired from the walk around the course and the mental exhaustion of having to play in the wind and the cold. But he hung in there.”
“Lauren Schonewolf,” Whitney said, “was probably the biggest score we had. She was the first one off the course and the first score to post. She was five over through three holes, so to finish with that 82 was just a real showing of her mental toughness.”
Both the Class B and Class A tournaments unfolded on the Tomahawk course at Natanis in Vassalboro. Par at Tomahawk is 72, which means Schonewolf went fully five over through three holes – a struggle of a start – and merely five more over through the remaining 15 holes – a brilliant turnaround.
Experience at Tomahawk helped the Capers take the crown. “Out of my lineup of the five that we had there,” said Whitney, “three of them play quite heavily on the [Maine State Golf Association] summer circuit. So they’d seen the course quite a bit.
“Plus, I sent down eight kids the week before for a practice round on the Tomahawk course.”
Of course, learning the layout of a course is but one of the challenges a golfer faces. Another is shifting conditions.
“Once you got down there, it was as cold as a January winter day,” Whitney said of Saturday’s tournament, “with the wind blowing 30, 40 miles an hour, and it was already 40 degrees out. The kids were sitting there between holes saying, ‘Coach, we can barely feel our hands.’”
The weather, then, was a great equalizer; all the teams on Tomahawk that day had to deal with it. “You can be on that course 1,000 times, but the conditions kind of leveled it out, to where it was pretty equal throughout the field,” Whitney said.
Whitney tells of a remarkable season overall: “We had a really deep and young – with a lot of potential – and talented team. So throughout the season, we had 15 different kids that competed on varsity in a countable, scoring match.”
In the regular season, a team takes six golfers to each match, and of those six, the top four scores are added together for the team’s total. So Cape wasn’t running the same four top golfers up and down every course; they were cycling through a huge pool of talented options.
It might’ve been a different story if the Capers hadn’t continued to win no matter how they altered their lineup from one match to the next. As it was, every combination of golfers Whitney took to a competition ended up winning, and the team went undefeated.
An interesting cherry to top the championship-season sundae: The Cape JV team competed “up,” in the SMAA JV Championship, because the Western Maine Conference, Cape’s regular group of schools, doesn’t have an equivalent tournament – and they won.
Whitney seems just as surprised and delighted by all these turns of events as most anyone might feel. It wasn’t his expectation, after all, to run the table.
“The whole regular season,” Whitney says, “my thing was to get the younger kids in the matches, to get their nerves tested early, before we got into the bigger matches, and kind of let them weed each other out to who would represent us at the state championship. And the ball just kept rolling.
“It was great. I just wanted to see all the kids get a chance to play. And it worked out that every single kid on the team played in at least two matches, and for the most part, three or more.”
Meanwhile, in Class A action, Scarborough – 2014 victors – turned in another excellent performance this year, taking third. TA won the Class A crown, shooting 310 collectively; Cheverus finished second at 324, just two strokes ahead of the Red Storm at 326. Messalonskee trailed Scarborough by four, at 330.
Anthony Burnham shot 77 for the Storm, Drew Kane 78, Nate Roberts 85 and Ian Trumpler 86. Fifth man Brogan Kane turned in an 86.
The Individual State Championship tournament will be held on Saturday, Oct. 17, also on Tomahawk at Natanis.
The Cape JV team was invited to compete “up” at the SMAA JV Championship Tournament – and they won. Mike MacKenzie was the individual champ in the Class A competition. Back row, from left, are Mike Mangravito, Liam Hayes, Mike MacKenzie, Hans Croft, Alex Glidden, Peter Haber, Hope Campbell, Mia Spencer. Front row, from left, are Chris Laprade and Jack Kelley.
The Capers pose with their new hardware after winning Saturday’s Class B Team State Championship. From left are Hope Campbell, Mia Spencer, Ryan Collins, Cole Spencer, Lauren Schonewolf, Max Altznauer, Jack Kelley, Mike MacKenzie, Pat McDonald, head coach Chris Whitney, captain Bryce Hewitt and Austin Legge.
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