The Aplington-Parkersburg boys golf team will enter the season as one of the more well-rounded teams in the North Iowa Cedar League.
The Falcons qualified for the district meet last year, and will have all but two golfers from that team back. Head Coach Gary Flanigan says it’ll be a seasoned varsity lineup.
“We do have a good nucleus coming back,” Flanigan says. “We got three seniors. We got Jace Pruisner, who statistically last year was probably one of our better golfers, and Cooper Hoff, who was a varsity golfer his first couple years in high school. He’s had health issues and surgeries. He’s healthy this year, so we’re looking forward to having him back and joining us at 100 percent health-wise. And we’ve got Kael Schoneman. So I’m hoping those guys will be good leaders for us and they have been all the way through in all their other sports. A couple other main scorers we have coming back would be Caleb Campbell, Mason Ridder and Benny Waller, they all played varsity for us last year. So we are returning four good varsity golfers from last year.”
Flanigan anticipates having several viable options to fill the varsity lineup.
“We’ve got quite a few freshmen and we’ve done one qualifying round and we’ve got some really good scores from our younger people. So I’m very excited. We’re going to have depth and that’s probably one thing we haven’t had the last few years. We’ve had maybe four guys, maybe five guys that we could depend on in the score. But now I’m looking at our stuff here and we’ve got 10 guys who are going to be under a bogey golfer and probably under a six handicap. So it’s good for them, for me as a coach and good for the AP team and it’s good for competition. But I think we’re probably going to have some disappointed guys who want to be on varsity and are really good golfers and they might not crack the lineup. So we’ll see how the year shakes out.”
The Falcons will begin the season Tuesday by joining AGWSR at a triangular hosted by Wapsie Valley at Maple Hills Country Club in Tripoli.
Interview with Flanigan:
