New coach, same result: Madison Central wins another region golf title
Madison Central as a team shot a 323 — three strokes better than runner-up Lexington Christian Academy, last year’s team champ — to win the 7h Region girls’ title for the third time in the last four years and advance to the Leachman Buick-GMC-Cadillac/KHSAA State Golf Tournament.
MacKenzie Neal, a senior, will play in her fifth and final state tournament as an Indian. She qualified as an individual when she was an eighth-grader in 2014 and has automatically advanced by virtue of her team’s overall performance each of the last four tournaments. She shot a 6-over-78 on Tuesday, good for fifth place overall.
GIRLS’ 7TH REGION GOLF CHAMPIONSHIP: CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE RESULTS
Neal said that she’s more familiar with Bowling Green Country Club, where the state tournament, than Gibson Bay Golf Course, which is mere miles from her high school. When Neal’s dad was the coach the team practiced at Boone’s Trace National Golf Club, near their home. Tennye Ohr, a PGA professional who played for the University of Kentucky and in four USGA Women’s Open Championships, succeeded Mike Neal in the offseason.
“I’m definitely more comfortable there than I am here, as crazy as that sounds,” Neal said. “ ... Until as of late, this course was just as foreign to me as any other course. We have practiced here a lot during the season so it’s become more comfortable, but I worked really hard to try to make it my course.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Great shot from the no. 14 fairway by Madison Central’s MacKenzie Neal, who won this event in 2016. Immediately after starts fighting with what she thought was “just a bug that makes noise” that bothered her during swing; turns out it was a bee <a href="https://t.co/25Bsl1lq2Y">pic.twitter.com/25Bsl1lq2Y</a></p>— Josh Moore (@HLpreps) <a href="https://twitter.com/HLpreps/status/1044603569511563264?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 25, 2018</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
MacKenzie Neal sees similarities between this year’s squad and the 2015 team that won the program’s first state title. Every member of the team has played in the state tournament at least once.
“This is exactly what happened in 2015, is all season long we were never really the best team,” MacKenzie Neal said. “We hung around in invitationals, we won a couple of our own, but for the most part we were that second- and third-place team. But when regionals and state come around, for some reason we always seem to become a first-place team rather than a second- and third-place team.”
Ohr, who teaches at Man O’War Golf in Lexington, has worked with most of Madison Central’s on an individual level but had never coached a high school team before this season. The former state champion — she won the 1976 individual title for Estill County — is now 1-for-1 in region championship attempts at a program that’s grown accustomed to bringing hardware to Richmond.
“My whole goal going into this week was to get ’em prepared to where they didn’t really need me to help them with shots,” Ohr said. “I wanted them to play as relaxed and loose as possible, but I think along the way they knew things were starting to get tight. ... It’s special to go down to the state tournament. I’m looking forward to it.”
Mattie Neeley shot a 77, tying Bryan Station’s Brennan Taylor for third place overall, to lead the Indians.
This story was originally published September 25, 2018 at 4:19 PM.