CANTERBURY – With five straight Division III titles and a 126-match win streak, the Bow High golf team hasn’t been outscored on any course since before the 2012 season. That run will be on the line today as Bow opens its season against Fall Mountain, Prospect Mountain and Campbell at Canterbury Woods Country Club.
Keeping the streak alive is one goal for the Falcons, but they have a greater focus on the bigger picture: a sixth consecutive Division III state championship.
“Our goal is to keep on winning,” junior captain Jason Howe said. “I’m trying to be right around even par, or just a little bit over, and just help the team get that sixth straight championship.”
There are a lot of spaces to fill in this year’s lineup as the Falcons had to say goodbye to graduating seniors Doug Champagne, Ronan Lucey, Colin Plumb and Jack Olson – a group that didn’t lose a single match in their four years at Bow. Champagne won individual titles in 2015 and ’16 while Olson and Lucey each cracked the top-6 in the championship last fall.
On top of a heavy turnover of players, the Falcons have a new head coach in Matt Davis, taking over for Mike Seraikas. who stepped down after completing his 18th season with the team.
The transition was planned from the beginning of the 2016 season. Davis, who worked in the pro shot at Canterbury Woods and teaches at Bow Middle School, assisted Seraikas by coaching some of the underclassmen that would eventually become his top players.
“It just felt right,” Seraikas told the Monitor before the 2016 season. “My thinking is it’s time for somebody else to take it over. … It’s just a logical thing for (Davis) to go in.”
What Seraikas left behind is a program with a firmly established culture of winning. What Davis inherited is a program in the midst of a youth movement, and that is hardly a bad thing. As the program steps into a new era, Davis can take some ownership of guiding the team as it starts anew.
“Mike did a really good job with his kids,” Davis said. “He had a great five-year stretch of players and worked a lot with those kids. The goal for (this year’s) guys is to get their games a little more solid to the point where they can hopefully bring some of their scores down and get the fundamentals down for matches.”
Davis isn’t pressuring his players to go out and win every match because he doesn’t expect them to simply fill the shoes left behind by others. Rather, he expects them to grow into those shoes over time. If the team isn’t competing for a state title at the end of this season, it won’t be very long until they are.
Howe is one half of the top pairing, the other being sophomore Jake Mielcarz. The next five positions will be more clear after Tuesday’s match.
“They’re both playing really consistent golf and have played a lot over the summer and have really worked on their games,” Davis said of Howe and Mielcarz. “I think three through seven is a little more fluid as of now, but as they start to play more I think we’ll have an idea of kind of where they’ll shake out.”
Howe recognized the value of investing time in training younger players as Bow enters a new season and continues to look to the future.
“(Coach Davis) knows what he’s talking about. He’s a great golfer so he can really help with the swings,” Howe said. “He really helped the JV kids (last year), which are a lot of the kids that are going to be trying to compete this year. So he’s worked with those kids and already has a really good connection with them.”
(Nick Stoico can be reached at 369-3339, nstoico@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @NickStoico.)