The girls are back on the green and coming up short.

Hopefully.

That, at least, is the goal of Spartan girls varsity golf team Head Coach Ian Havill, who intends to focus the team’s game this year more intensely on putting in the hope of upping their status later in the season.

“We’re driving the ball really well,” Havill said. “Most important is our putting and our short game.”

If the players got extra points for awesome drives, he added, “we’d be killing everybody.”

“So far, our players have really driven the ball well, but haven’t scored as well as they can and they’re capable of,” he explained. “So we’ve just got to knock the rust off a little on the short game, which is what our plan is.”

The past has taught the coach that focus on the short game, 30 yards and closer, yields long rewards.

“When we did win the Metro championship, the first couple of years that I was here, we spent almost all of our time on short game,” he said. “[And] not any at the driving range.”

Overall the 2015-16 squad boasts 15 players, including seven on the varsity squad, of which six are experienced returners. The team has only one senior this year, returning team captain Claire Lunzer, and one particularly standout freshman, Lucy Hanacek, making her debut on the varsity squad.

Havill said that Taylor Tye and Kiera Havill, two returning juniors, will act as the team’s assistant or “junior” captains, a policy he recently instituted to better prepare the soon-to-be seniors for team leadership roles. Rounding out the varsity roster is Maddie Loverich, Nicole Daniels and Sophia Smith.

“It’s a good group of hard workers,” Havill said. “[They] get to practice on time [and] get a lot of reps. That should pay off as the season goes along.”

“I feel like we have a really strong core varsity team this year,” agreed Lunzer, adding that Spartan fans should definitely watch for great things in the future from the team’s fresh-faced varsity freshman Hanacek.

“She’s really good,” Lunzer said. “I think she’s going to be a really good player.”

Lunzer likened her role of senior captain to “the mother hen,” with responsibilities on and off the course.

“I give rides a lot,” she laughed. “I host breakfast for Metros and sometimes I bake muffins to bring when we have matches or make little goodie bags and just get people pumped. Sometimes I take people out to eat and just talk.”

The squad’s solo senior said she has greatly enjoyed her years on the team but does not intend to continue playing competitively.

“I have a lot of fun with it,” she said. “And I don’t like to get super, super competitive. College level, that’s just not for me.”

Whether played competitively or socially, Havill said, golf is an invaluable networking tool in the business and professional worlds, especially for young women.

Lunzer said that the sport has already helped her in ways she did not expect.

“There’s some philosophies that Ian has taught me that I actually use in my everyday life,” she said. “There’s this whole risk/reward thing where, if you’re out from a certain yardage you can take a risk with a certain club and you might be able to get it on the green, but there’s always that risk that you [won’t] hit that club properly. Or you could play it safe.”

Also beneficial is the focus she’s managed to cultivate in the sport, Lunzer said.

“Golf really makes you think and focus,” she explained. “You have to just focus entirely on that moment in a swing.

“That kind of carried out into my everyday life.”

The teams to beat this year, Havill and Lunzer agreed, will most likely be Roosevelt, Eastside Catholic and Holy Names Academy.

“I really want to beat Holy Names,” Lunzer laughed.

Nevertheless, the pressures of the early season are being kept in check, Havill said, and the team is preparing the same, regardless of their slated opponent.

In golf, he said, as so often in life, you’re really playing against yourself.

“You’re part of a Bainbridge tradition of doing well,” he advised the team. “And not just scoring well, but behaving well. To represent our school in a certain way.

“I don’t think it’s really a pressure to do well,” he added. “It’s more an obligation to uphold the tradition of the program.”