Sports

Ireland, Freshmen Lead Redwood to Golf Crown

Four years of hard work pays off for the senior star as the Giants 'blow away' the competition at the MCAL Championships and now move on to the NCS competition.

A funny thing happened in Mr. Nash’s Physics class the other day.

The topic of conversation turned to golf. And why not?

After all, Nash had been the golf coach during ’s freshman and sophomore seasons.

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Today, Ireland is a senior and leading the Giants to such great golf heights, even his Physics teacher is excited.

“At the beginning of this year, me and talked about how much we wanted to win this year, our senior year,” Ireland recalled. “There were four guys who were scratch golfers (at other schools) who had graduated last year, so we knew our time had come.

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“And we picked up four freshmen.”

Ah, the freshmen. According to Ireland, , , and were as instrumental as anyone in the Giants improving to second in the Marin County Athletic League regular-season standings and then capturing the league title at the MCAL Championships at StoneTree earlier this month.

“When we’d start adding up scores,” Ireland said of a typical regular-season match, “sometimes the third and fourth guys come in and we’d be down by one or two, or maybe up by a couple. But then Jon Shaw and Chris Laub would destroy their guys by 10-15 strokes, and we’d pull way.

“There were a lot of times when Jon would come in with better score than our No. 2 or No. 1 guy.”

That depth was a key in Redwood triumphing at StoneTree. Ireland didn’t have his best round – a double- and triple-bogey contributing to an 81 – and that led to some anxious moments as he awaited his teammates to finish their rounds.

“Even before our sixth guy came in, the tournament director came up and congratulated us all,” Ireland recalled. “I asked, ‘Do you think we won it?’ He said, ‘Yeah. You blew it out of the water by like 20 strokes.’’’

Actually, it was 13 strokes. Laub and Shaw led the way that day with 79s. The Salem brothers, and , chipped in with an 84 and 88, respectively.

After enduring the building process for two years with his Physics teacher. After finishing sixth in the regular season and fourth in the Championships the season before. After having lost twice to Marin Catholic this Spring …

“We knew we could beat every team except M.C. We had yet to beat them,” Ireland admitted. “Going in, we thought we had a chance. But when they counted up the final scores, it was still shocking.”

The Giants will participate Monday in the North Coast Section Championships at the Contra Costa Country Club, a layout with which they already have become a bit familiar. While many of the other NCS-bound clubs needed to qualify for the Championships this week, Redwood took advantage of its automatic bid to sneak over to Pleasant Hill for a practice round Tuesday.

Ireland is encouraged.

“It’s a pretty short course, so we think we can score well. We had a bunch of birdies,” he said. “All of our players can shoot par or better. Like at the MCALs, it’s just a matter of getting all the guys to have a good day.”

Wouldn’t that make Physics class a blast on Tuesday?


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