The COVID-19 pandemic has created a strange year for all sports, including women’s golf, who lost the fall tournament season this year. True freshman Isabel Amezcua has been navigating this season, juggling a compressed tournament schedule with competing at the collegiate level for the very first time.
Amezcua has been playing golf for most of her life. Prior to beginning at the collegiate level, Amezcua qualified for and competed in the Optimist Junior Golf Championship in 2017 and 2018. In 2019, she secured six top-three finishes with five of those being runner-up spots throughout the season.
“I started golf when I was about four years old,” Amezcua said. “I’d grown up watching my family and my brother play, and so there was always that need to be with my family and just having fun, and so my brother was actually the one who gave me my first club, and I just escalated from there and I fell in love with the game.”
Amezcua and head coach Page Marsh met early on in Amezcua’s golf career. Coach Marsh had only exemplary remarks of Amezcua, both on and off the golf course, even from the first time she saw her compete.
“I knew [Amezcua] from watching her at the Optimus Junior and I think she was 14 or 15 at the time; she was around the lead of the tournament, so I watched her play a big stage and saw how she handled herself,” Marsh said. “She had what we call a nose for playing the game and being around the lead, and that’s a real art. It’s something that in sports and at elite levels something that you either grow into or you just had in your life and she had that. She also had a great love of the game, and it was her love. She exuded passion and joy, it was evident.”
Amezcua has shown steady improvement in her tournament rankings since the beginning of the season. Her highest ranking came in the Palmetto Intercollegiate tournament where she came 31st of 62. This ranking came after the first two tournaments of the season where she placed 73rd of 90 and 52nd of 75. In the later portion of the season, Amezcua wasn’t able to top her performance at Palmetto, but she was the only NC State player to win a match at the Big Four Challenge on March 20.
“From the first day we got here, it was kind of like we had to be ready for everything,” Amezcua said. “So once we got here, we had our first tournament within the first 10 days and so basically it’s just been working every day mentally, physically, to get ourselves prepared. There’s been almost no days off, but really it’s been worth it because we’ve seen a huge impact on the team.”
When thinking about her past performances, Amezcua tries to take it day by day to learn from them.
“Golf is really a 50-50% chance of how you’re gonna do, and I think that other 50% of doing good keeps me going every day,” Amezcua said. “And it’s always getting 1% better by day, and I just go on a daily basis because if I keep on thinking ‘I did so bad on that tournament, I could’ve made that put,’ it’ll stop me. So I kind of try to forget what I did and learn from it instead of hanging onto the past.”
Marsh has a “train, test and rest” mindset, where it’s critical that all three parts are being implemented. This season has been a strange one, in that the team’s tests have only come in the spring season.
“It’s been an unusual year, so her debut fall season is being compressed in the spring,” Marsh said. “What she missed this year, you know the word puritisation from fitness, you train, test, and rest. Well, we had the training and the resting, but we never had the test, so it was hard for her. She did play some outside opportunities, but it was hard when you don’t have that test.”
Despite a rough start in an odd year, Amezcua remains hopeful for the rest of the season for both herself and the team.
“It’s been rough, I’m not going to lie,” Amezcua said. “It’s been a lot of hard work and little time to do so but all in all, I feel very proud of myself with the Palmetto Invitational. I got started off to a rocky start the first round, the second round was really good, I think it was my best score. And yeah, as a team, we felt we’d advanced much more than the last two tournaments, and we felt like we showed a little bit more of what we can be like as a team and I think we’re just getting started right now.”
Amezcua and the women’s golf team will be competing in the ACC Tournament Thursday, April 15-18 in Greensboro, North Carolina.
