SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Every team wants a player who steps up and delivers in the biggest moments. For the Georgia women, that’d be Candice Mahé.
Sure, the native of Gourin, France, only has a pair of top-five finishes for the Bulldogs, but both have been in the postseason. Mahé finished T-5 at last year’s Columbus regional, T-3 at this year’s Albuquerque regional and currently sits T-6 at the 2022 NCAA Div. I Women’s Golf Championship following a second-round 3-under 69, one shot off the low round of the day.
“It just shows her teammates it’s out there. Be patient, you can make it. You can do this,” said head coach Josh Brewer of the importance of Mahé’s round. Georgia climbed seven spots into 10th place, five positions inside Sunday’s 54-hole cut to the top 15 teams. “She shows up at the right time.”
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“That’s the reason why I play golf. I really like pressure and when there’s people watching,” said Mahé. “Everybody remembers the name of the national champion and not the regular season and I feel like this tournament is way more important. I might be able to focus way more and I’m gonna have to work on this to find the same thing for regular season, but I’m sure it’s gonna come.”
Mahé became just the fourth Bulldog to shoot a sub-70 round at the NCAA Championship, joining the likes of 1992 national champion Vicki Goetze, 2002 runner-up Summer Sirmons and Shauna Estes, who finished third in 1999. After a 6 under start through her first 11 holes, Mahé made her first two bogeys of the day on Nos. 12 and 13, bounced back with a birdie on the 14th and then made double bogey on the par-4 17th.
“Obviously right now I’m still frustrated from my round because I was 6 under after 11 and I feel like when you have that good of a start you should be able to go super low,” said Mahé, who credited her consecutive bogeys to her adrenaline which impacted her distance control. “I finished with a double so definitely not what I expected but we have tomorrow. We did a good job as a team and we’re really here to make it into much play and then it’s a new tournament. I guess everything can happen.”
After shooting an 81 at the SEC Championship in April, her worst score in college, these last two weeks in the southwest have been great for Mahé’s confidence.
“I feel like I needed that to actually work from this and coaches helped me a lot to work on my golf swing and on my confidence because you can lose their confidence really quick,” she explained. “When I have a round like this I’m really proud of myself because it’s been tough for everybody.”
“We finished well yesterday, played our last five holes four under and the momentum carried over,” said Brewer. “I get it, people are gonna say, ‘You’re finished stunk today,’ but the thing is, if you told me I could be in 10th place heading into Sunday, how we got there I don’t care, so now we know we have the firepower to go out because we had a special round.”
Brewer noted how playing in the Albuquerque regional not only helped with handling the 20-mph winds this week, but also the poise it gave his group.
“It gave us confidence,” said Brewer of the Bulldogs’ third-place finish two weeks ago in New Mexico. “We’ve been playing well all year, we’ve been waiting and finally we did it.”
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