Warriors golf team on par for conference finals after neutral match
The Warriors’ Chan Suk uses his driver club to swing and hit the ball above the field of birds and the pond of water in front of him at the Orange Empire Neutral match in Chino Hills on April 12. While El Camino placed ninth overall, Suk was the Warriors’ best scorer with 79. (Khoury Williams | The Union).
The El Camino College golf team came in last place with a score of 420 during the coastal Orange Empire Conference match at the Cottonwood Golf Club in San Diego on April 17. The Warriors will be returning to Chino Hills for conference finals on Monday, April 24.
Featuring ten California community colleges from both coastal and inland areas, the El Camino College golf team hosted the April 12 Orange Empire Conference Neutral Match at the Los Serranos Country Club in Chino Hills.
El Camino came in at ninth place with a total score of 436 from six golfers representing the Warriors. Saddleback College took first place overall with a score of 384.
Although El Camino placed ninth, their placement for the neutral match will not affect its standing going into conference finals, coach Stacy Komai said.
Komai added the Warriors have been improving, but are struggling overall to keep their scores below 90 as a team.
For individual scores, Chan Suk would lock in El Camino’s best score with 79, followed by his teammate Bradley Yamamoto with a score of 85. Suk and Yamamoto were the only players for the Warriors to score below 90.
With his driver club in hand, Suk stepped up to the tee and took a few practice shots before making a big swing at the golf ball, striking nearly halfway toward the green on the opening 560-yard, par-five hole.
After 18 holes, five hours and 74 total pars stretching across 7,628 yards of land, Suk and his pair of golfers embraced each other with congratulatory handshakes, smiles and hugs as they cheered on the rest of their teammates to finish.
Echoing the sentiment of his peers, Yamamoto said he was grateful for getting the chance to participate in the neutral match but said he was frustrated navigating the rough terrain.
“Putting was a little rough. The greens were punched last week, so the ball wasn’t rolling its line. It was kind of bouncing a little bit,” Yamamoto said. “I [could] hit the ball okay, just putting was off.”
Freshman Tyshawn Christy scored 96 during the neutral match, which has been a consistent scoring threshold for Christy throughout the season.
Christy said he plans on sticking with golf in the future and will have to keep practicing to improve his scores on the longer “crooked” holes.
“You got to know how to plan right with dogleg left and right holes because if you don’t, then you’re going to be out of bounds,” Christy said. “I’m slowly working on it.”
Freshman Braden Guerrero from Orange Coast College was paired up with Suk and scored an 85 for his seventh-place team.
Gurrero has been playing on top of an unspecified injury and said college-level golf has been a wake-up call for him.
“College is a newsflash and now I’m just fighting to place top 10. I know that I could do so much better,” Guerrero said. “[Golf] is one of the most fun things to do when you can go crazy and finish like [Suk] did, but there’s nothing we could do now.”
Editor’s Note: Corrected grammatical errors on April 18, 2023, at 10:14 p.m.
