BY CHAD DARE
Commercial-News
DANVILLE —
Playing on your home course is supposed to be an advantage.
That wasn’t the case on Friday for the Danville Vikings, nor was it the case for a few of the Salt Fork Storm golfers at the Danville Vikings Invitational at Turtle Run Golf Course
Salt Fork senior Mat Bowen had the best round of any local golfer with a 78, finishing in 15th place, and helping the Storm to a sixth-place showing in the team standings.
But Bowen, who played at Turtle Run all summer, said Friday’s round was his worst all year.
“I had four 3-putts and that is very disappointing considering this is my home course,’’ said Bowen, who had a 65 at Turtle Run in the past month. “Their was more wind today, but I still should have played better.’’
Two strokes behind Bowen in the individual competition was Danville senior Zach Bell, whose 80 put him into a tie for 25th and the Vikings were 10th with a score of 345.
“I really expected to play better than this today,’’ Bell said. “I had a pretty good start, but it never really got rolling for me.
“As a team, we’ve shot better than this out here and we should have had a better score.’’
The next best score for Danville was an 86 from Tyler Ellis, who was another golfer that got off to a good start and couldn’t finish the day off right.
After Ellis came Trey Davis with an 88 and Spencer Richardson shot an 91 to round out the Danville scores.
“When you are playing in your own invitational, you want to do better than what we did today,’’ Bell said.
For the Salt Fork Storm, it was their first-ever appearance in the Danville Invitational, which was won by Mahomet-Seymour with a score of 305.
“In my four years at Salt Fork, we haven’t been in many 18-hole invitationals with a lot of competition,’’ Bowen said. “It’s exciting, but the way we performed is really disappointing.
“We wanted to prove all the doubters wrong about our fifth-place finish in state last year. We had a legitimate shot to win this.’’
Prep Boys Soccer
Danville 3
Macomb 0
QUINCY — The Vikings outshot Macomb 21-6 and made the most of that advantage in a win at the Quincy Notre Dame Tournament.
Jose Tapia got things started with a penalty kick goal before halftime for a 1-0 lead for the Vikings.
In the second half, Weston DePratt and Zach Downing scored goals with Jared Paterson and Roman Tapia picking up assists.
Stephen Mielke had four saves in the shutout as Danville improves to 4-1.
