Emma de Groot, Christine Wolf, Katie Taylor and coach Colette Murray huddled around a table in athletic director Rick Hart’s office, listening to elevator music over the speaker phone.
The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga women’s golfers had little use for the soothing sounds.
They were plenty relaxed already, having guaranteed themselves a spot in the NCAA regionals by winning the Southern Conference championship last week. They just wanted to know where they’d play next.
“Last year we were waiting and thinking, ‘Please call our name,'” Wolf said. “This year, we knew we were going to go.”
A moderator’s voice replaced the tunes and rattled off 11 teams heading to the East Regional before announcing that the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga would be headed there as well.
Murray and her players smiled.
And they kept listening — with Murray scribbling down every team announced — to hear the full list of opponents May 6-8 at Ironwood Country Club in Greenville, N.C.
The Lady Mocs were given the No. 12 seed in the 24-team regional. The tops six seeds are, in order, Duke, Auburn, Wake Forest, Pepperdine, Vanderbilt and Tennessee. Southern Conference teams Furman and the College of Charleston also are headed to North Carolina.
“The teams that we’re up against, we’ve played and we’ve beat,” Murray said. “Even the No. 1 seed, Duke, we played them in the Hooters (Collegiate Match Play) and we beat them in the qualifying.
“There’s nobody there we can’t compete with.”
UCLA earned the top seed in the West at the Stanford Golf Course, where Alabama is No. 2, and Arizona State is the top seed at Columbia, Ind., in the Central, which includes Mississippi. Baylor graduates Brooke Pancake and Sara Grantham are leaders for Alabama and Ole Miss, respectively.
The top 10 teams from each of the three regional sites will advance to the NCAA championships May 18-21 at the Country Club of Landfall in Wilmington, N.C.
Last season, the Lady Mocs earned an at-large berth into a regional and finished eighth to advance to the NCAA tournament. So next week’s event is nothing new, and not nearly as daunting, even though the program is wrapping up its third year of competition.
“It’s a sense of belonging now,” de Groot said. “Last year, maybe people thought Chattanooga fluked their way in. But you can’t fluke your way in two years in a row. It’s a feeling like we belong there and we play against these teams week in and week out. We deserve to be there, too.”
But the Lady Mocs will be up against a challenge. UTC likely will have only four participants: the three listening to the conference call and junior Maria Juliana Loza.
The tournament format is for five golfers to play with the four best scores each day counting toward the team score. UTC will not have a drop score.
“There are going to be a few changes before we get there that will probably affect the results,” Murray said. “Time will tell. We’ll see what happens.
“We’re going to go out there and give it our best shot.”