Blonde hair swept up in a ponytail. Blue eyes filled with hope. The stance of determination. She swings back. Her club drives toward the ground. Swoosh. The tiny white ball soars through the air. It was the day Hannah Ritchie fell in love.

Golf has always been a huge part of Hannah’s life. As a fifth grader, she watched her sister play on the high school team. The next year, Hannah decided to join her. “I was the youngest on the team,” she said. “Everyone else was in high school.”

As a sixth grader, Hannah had lots to learn from the upperclassmen about golf and leadership. This year, she enters her seventh year on the team as the only senior. “It’s really bittersweet because I’ve lost everyone that I started playing with,” she says.

However, Hannah will still remember the players she once looked up to by being a role model for her own team. Ritchie has been to state individually twice, becoming the first girl golfer from GRC to do so.

This year, she hopes to go again-this time as a team. To achieve this goal, Ritchie says she has to “encourage the girls to do their best and show them that they have potential.”

This seems like a hard task since each teammate is on a different hole during a tournament. However, Hannah says, “I always ask my coach how the other girls are doing, and if he says not well I always say ‘tell them to finish strong’.”

Ritchie says the mindset you keep during a tournament is crucial to your performance stating, “If you get down on yourself, you aren’t going to do as well.” However, she emphasizes not to fret if you have a bad round. “You never know what the next shot is going to be,” she says. “If you have a bad shot you just wipe it off because the next one could be the best one.”

The girls golfers hope to put this idea into play by shooting their best round of golf on Sept. 26 in their regional competition.

(Smoke Signals went to press before regions began.)