From the looks of Kyla Spickert’s face, you couldn’t always tell what kind of day she is having on the course.

So the Centralia junior’s results speak for themselves. Spickert qualified for her first state tournament at the Class 2 girls tournament Oct. 21-22 at Fremont Hills Country Club in Nixa after finishing sixth in Class 2 District 2 along with a list of other accomplishments this season.

Spickert and head coach John Finlay said they both felt she had what it took for state qualification at the sixth event of the season at Kirksville. Spickert shot a 40 and earned second place going shot-for-shot with all-stater Addi Davis on her home course.

“I played extremely well that day, and I thought I could continue this and do that well in the future,” Spickert said. 

“That was probably her best round of the year and the best round she’s ever had,” Finlay said. “She was playing with a very good girl with Kirksville, and she wasn’t intimidated. She played right along with that kid.”

Spickert had other notable performances such as shooting a 99 at New Bloomfield on a course used for state tournaments, and she was the Clarence Cannon Conference runner-up behind an all-stater Morgan Crist, of Highland, after shooting an 87. In a loaded district played at Eldon that contained at least six or seven all-staters, according to Finlay, Spickert finished with a 91 to take sixth and easily qualify for state.

After her good round at districts, Spickert’s reaction was “excited and shocked” because she felt she didn’t play as well. Finlay said that was due to three bad holes, but Spickert did tremendously on the rest of the course. Of course, Finlay said he couldn’t tell at the time how Spickert was feeling thanks to her composure.

“I really wish I could tell what Kyla shot on the last hole after she walks off the green,” Finlay said. “She is pretty stone-faced. At state, there were a couple times she had a great big smile on her face when she walked off the green because she had a great hole. For the most part, she plays a hole, writes her score down and moves on to the next hole.”

Finlay recalls seeing an “enormous” smile on Spickert’s face after chipping in an eagle on a hole in the Kirksville tournament and a “pretty big” smile after a chip in on hole No. 9 on the second day of state. Spickert finished with a 97 on Day 2 of the par 71 course in Nixa to improve on her Day 1 score of 106 and finished with a 36th-place two-day score of 203.

Finlay is impressed Spickert is so positive whether she has a good day or bad day and makes her hard to rattle in a game that rattles so many people. Spickert has been golfing since her freshman season with the Lady Panthers and is already a one-time state qualifier heading into her senior season.

“I improved on my chipping and putting a lot,” Spickert said. “Last year, my short game was not that good, and that’s what got my scores up. This year, I improved on those two things, and they brought my score down.”

Finlay said Spickert on one of her best days is able to hit a green from 130 yards out and place it close to the pin. Then she can sink a putt in one or two tries, which he said she did on every hole at conference and districts. 

As Spickert knows from her past, scores can increase the more time a golfer has to spend putting on a green. Knowing how to approach those situations, and most importantly, not being intimidated can prevent the situation from spiraling out of control.

“You have to have confidence and gain an understanding of the greens on a practice green,” Finlay said. “A lot of times, if you’re a long way away, we don’t even try to make the first putt. We try to get it as close as we can. We put it on the right line for it to go in, but we are OK with rolling it up there and being two feet shy or two feet past it and making that putt.”

Finlay said being too aggressive can especially hurt on a fast green, and Fremont Hills in Nixa had a lot of those. He said those areas on 10 or 11 of the holes were elevated 20-, 30- or 40-feet to begin with, and the bentgrass proved to be “more grabby” than the grass back home as it knocked off 10-15 yards of her shots into the green. Overall that created a course that was impossible to simulate after Spickert tried her best by practicing with hole No. 5 on Centralia’s course.

Spickert said the practice round on the previous Sunday was the first time she stepped on to the Nixa course and found out after playing on it for two days how “extremely hard” it was. She said it is the hardest course she has played but knows to expect that in her campaign to make it back to state next year.

“I became more comfortable with the greens and speed of the greens,” Spickert said about her better Day 2. “I made a lot better putts. I started to realize what clubs I needed to use for the distances. The distances were all off of normally of what they would be.”

Finlay isn’t surprised how Spickert was able to adjust from one day to the next at state as he saw that over three years with her. Spickert “put it together” after not being able to find the green as a freshman, finding the green but not the bottom of the hole as a sophomore and finally doing both as a junior this year.

“It’s been steps every year,” Finlay said. “When she first started out, she was swinging and coach (Luke Gramke) were like, ‘I don’t think she is swinging hard enough’ and coach challenged to take some really hard cuts in her freshman year in the second week of practice. We told her to swing too hard about five swings with her driver. About the third time she did it, she hit it about a mile — about as long as anybody on the team was hitting it. She did a again and did it again and were like, ‘OK, that’s your driver swing.’”

Spickert has become a more complete player in her career and would like to complete her list of accomplishments with a state medal next year. Not surprisingly, she said attitude is just as important in that goal.

“I could practice more and work on my attitude toward the game,” Spickert said. “If you get in your head, you start having more bad holes. If you keep a positive attitude, you can keep getting better scores.”

Look for the printed story in the Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, edition of the Mexico Ledger.