The cold winter months of Muncie caused the men's golf team to get off to a slow start, but recently the team has been improving.
The team has played two tournaments in Florida so far, finishing eighth and third, and today the team will play in Arkansas at the Lindsey Collegiate Classic.
"We started off kind of slow, but not terrible. So I think there's some hope," junior Patrick Wilkes-Krier said.
The hope Wilkes-Krier refers to is the chance the team has of winning the Mid-American Conference Championship in May, something the team hasn't done since the 1986 season.
"We have a real good chance this year of doing that just because we have a lot of talent on our team and we're probably as deep as we've been in the last couple years," Wilkes-Krier said. "If we could just manage to put it all together, which is what we've been struggling to do for the last couple of seasons, we could have some really great success."
Lately, the team has had trouble with all five of its golfers having a strong finish at the same time, but Wilkes-Krier expects that to happen sometime this season.
"We do have faith that it's there and we can play well," he said. "I think that each of these tournaments is an opportunity for us to prove it to ourselves."
Wilkes-Krier is one of the members so far this season who has golfed consistently. He has been the Cardinals' second man in the lineup in each of the tournaments. He placed 20th overall at the Irish Invitational with rounds of 76, 75 and 79, and then placed 17th overall at the El Diablo Intercollegiate with rounds of 78, 77 and 73.
"Patrick really did a better job this past weekend at El Diablo," head coach Mike Fleck said. "He was a little bit more focused. I think he's a little bit more comfortable with his game now than what he was a few weeks ago."
Wilkes-Krier said he's hitting the ball as well as he ever has and has been working on playing consistently.
"I'm very pleased so far with what's going on with my game," he said. "The only things slowing me down now are just short games, which I kind of have to expect after a winter layoff."
In high school, Wilkes-Krier said he focused a lot on hitting the ball, but now he knows most of his shots will be fine -- it's more about the smaller things.
"It's a matter of trying to maintain your game on the course mentally and making the right decisions," he said. "It's a difficult thing to do sometimes; the process is a lot slower."
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