The Manhattan High Varsity boys golf team competed in two away games in Topeka this past week, both locations of which will be where League and Regionals take place. 

“I felt like the team did not play to its potential,” Ficke said. “That’s kind of golf in a nutshell … You rarely do play to your potential [and] there’s no teammate to help you out … There’s no ‘well, my teammate will pick up my slack’ [or] ‘I’m not making baskets, but I’m going to pass it to the guy who is.’” 

Last Wednesday, the team played the Village Greens golf course, the same location for the League meet on May 3. Out of 12 teams, the boys took seventh overall.

“It was a cold and windy day, and on that golf course bogeys are pretty easy,” Ficke said. “[When] you combine that with the slow greens and the inability to adjust, … it’s easy to … get in this rhythm and have this expectation [that] it is what is is and it’s not happening today, as opposed to being proactive about it and saying ‘I’m going to make something happen.’”

Junior Grant Snowden led the team in 15th with an 82, freshman Miles Braxmeyer scored 18th with an 83, junior Jonathan Wefald and senior Owen Braxmeyer took home 19th place in a six-way tie with 84s, junior Trey Sauder collected 25th with an 85 and freshman Ian Floersch shot a 94.

On Monday, the boys competed at the Topeka Country Club, where Regionals will be held on May 17. The team — who took the top five scoring players from Wednesday’s meet — walked away with scores all in the 80s. Snowden and Miles hit 84s, Owen scored an 86 and Wefald and Sauder shot 88s. 

“Consider I have a …  broken left pinkie [and] considering the circumstances today,” Snowden said, “I felt like it [went] pretty [well]. [There] was some pretty tough wind, but four out of five guys [on Monday] had never played [the] course before, so I think all shooting in the 80s was probably a good win for us and for some of them going forward from here.”

For the past two meets, the top five ranked Varsity boys have scored within three to four strokes of one another, and that’s not including some Junior Varsity boys who are coming in with similar scores.

“There possibly could be some reshuffling [of player ranks], but whatever is going to happen is going to have to happen pretty quickly,” Ficke said. “There’s six to seven to eight kids who [are] packed pretty tightly together based on qualification scores and tournament results, so … it’s a good and bad problem to have, depending on who you are or the perspective that you take.”

This Friday, the boys will hit the road to play a morning tournament in Hutchinson.