centaurs pg 4 6-9-22

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Teeing Off
Freshman Lily Bottone tees off. She received All-ECC honorable mention this season. Photo by Marc Allard.


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Teeing Off
Senior Kyle Brennan, teeing off earlier in the season, surprised himself with a second-place finish in the ECC championship. Photo by Marc Allard.


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Golf Team 3rd
The girls’ golf team finished off its season with a third-place finish in the ECC championship tournament. Photo by Adam Bottone.



Ecstatic. It’s the word that Woodstock Academy boys’ golf coach Rich Garceau used to describe his feelings following the ECC boys’ golf championship tournament last week.
The Centaurs had better than a good day as they finished in second place overall with a 326 total, just nine strokes behind the winner, Killingly.
“I was completely thrilled,” Garceau said. “I don’t remember being that excited walking off a golf course in, quite honestly, years.”
The coach always thought his team had something more to give, but it never truly came to the surface. He felt he had to rein them in most of the time and get them to focus on the task at hand.
The day before, the Centaurs hosted Killingly and lost, 7-0, to finish the regular season with a 10-9 record. Killingly finished with a 159-stroke total while Woodstock struggled with a 185.
“We did some putting before we got on the bus (Thursday), we did some talking on the bus, and I explained to them that if they could give me five hours of focused golf, we would be the favorites to win our division. That’s what they went out and did,” Garceau said.
The Centaurs did finish first among the four ECC Division I teams, 14 strokes better than NFA.
Garceau saw it happening in Groton.
He used a baseball analogy; if a pitcher is throwing a no-hitter going into the ninth inning, teammates tend not to talk to them for fear of getting them out of the zone they had created.
He had to do the same with his athletes.
“I had a cooler of water and I was handing it out to the guys and every time I drove up to (No. 1 player) Kyle (Brennan) and, really all of them, there was a different level of focus. It got to the point where once I realized that all Kyle needed was not water but to be left alone, I let him go,” Garceau said. “I had no idea what his score was but I knew Kyle had something special going on. When he walked off the 18th green, he looked at me with a big smile on his face.”
Brennan carded a three-over par 74 to finish second overall, just a stroke back of Killingly’s Harrison Giambattista for the ECC individual title.
“I was just going in there looking to shoot in the low to mid 70s and I definitely did that. I had some strokes out there that I left but I can’t complain about a 74,” Brennan said.
The practice before the departure paid off.
“The putter worked well. I was sinking a lot of putts and I haven’t been able to putt the past couple of weeks. It just turned on and I couldn’t stop draining them from outside 10-feet,” Brennan said.
As he was the first in, he nervously awaited the arrival of his teammates. He didn’t have much to be jittery about.
Chris Thibault, who voluntarily gave up his driver a week ago in a regular-season match, had the club in his bag but never pulled it out.
“He did a great job disciplining himself. Sometimes, he can go out there and be a wild horse, but he left the driver in the bag. He was so in control of himself and his emotions, which is sometimes what gets to him, and stuck to the game plan; hit it a little shorter and hit it in the fairways,” Garceau said.
Thibault was only six strokes behind Brennan. Junior Davis Simpson carded an 83.
Brennan was named an ECC Div. I All-Star. The Centaurs did qualify for the Div. I state tournament held June 6.
Girls’ Golf: NFA Wins
The ECC girls’ golf championship tournament has been dominated by Woodstock recently. The Centaurs had finished on top in five of the last six years the event was held.
But this was a rebuilding year for Woodstock.
As a result, the Centaurs finished third in the championship with a 221 stroke-total. That was behind NFA (205) and E. Lyme (211). It was the first championship for the Wildcats since 2014.
“I’m sad that we didn’t win but we’ve won quite a few times,” said senior Jillian Marcotte said. ”Getting third is not far off. We were nine strokes off our best score and we didn’t have Sophia (Gronski) finish with us. We all shot in the 50s. It’s about as good as we could ask for.”
Gronski was forced to withdraw from the championship due to an injury.
“(Gronski) is capable of shooting better than another score but even with that, our best score was 212 this year and we weren’t too far away. All I asked was that the girls come here and compete and they did that. They gave it their best,” said coach Earl Semmelrock.
Semmelrock said the course was playing harder than it has all year as the rough is beginning to grow and the greens were hard and fast so the scores were pretty good for Woodstock.
Marcotte shot a 52 and freshman Lily Bottone added a 54. Ella Musumeci and Shannon Cunniff were right behind with a 57 and 58 respectively. Of that group, only Marcotte will be walking across the stage on graduation day. Marcotte was named an ECC All-Star while Bottone received honorable mention.
By Marc Allard
Director of Sports Information
The Woodstock Academy