Bradley, coming off an all-time season, can rewrite the ending at NGI

If there is such a thing as postseason whiplash, the Bradley’s women’s golf team lived it on April 22. The Braves had just come agonizingly close to winning the Missouri Valley Conference Championship for an Automatic Qualifying spot into NCAA Regionals. They only missed by one shot.

Given that, the drive home to Peoria, Illinois, from TPC Deere Run in Silvis was a long one. And then the pendulum swung the other way when head coach Halley Morell found an invitation to the National Golf Invitational in her inbox the next morning.

“Emotions were all over the place even then,” Morrell said. “Obviously there’s new excitement but still reeling from the emotions the day before. It was definitely an emotional week.”

The opportunity to compete in the NGI for the first time in history – and to compete in the postseason as a team for the first time in 20 years – was an about-face that Bradley’s women couldn’t turn down, even if it meant working out a lot of details. The two seniors on Bradley’s team, Caroline McConnell and Allison Pacocha, will miss graduation. Other plans, like internships, needed reshuffling. But ultimately, it’s a second chance for an ending more fitting to the body of work Bradley authored over the past eight months.

If ever in Bradley history there was a season that deserved to continue into May, this is it. Conference close-call aside, Bradley finished inside the top 5 five other times, most notably at the Rio Verde Invitational in February when the team came from behind to beat Xavier, a top-75 program, down the stretch.

“There’s so much good that happened that can be a little bit overshadowed when the conference doesn’t go this way,” Morrell said. “I thought the NGI was a great opportunity to finish the season on a little bit of a better note and really cap it off in what the season was, which was a really great season.”

The National Golf Invitational will be played May 15-17 at Ak-Chin Southern Dunes Golf Club in Maricopa, Arizona – roughly an hour from the site of Bradley’s Rio Verde title. Morrell said her team has loved dessert golf every time she has taken a squad to that event, a detail that already gives Bradley a leg up for the NGI – not to mention what happened in February.

“It was cool to watch them go believe in themselves like that,” Morrell said of the exciting finish three months ago. “And to just go do it and to prove that they can compete with anybody in the country. That memory absolutely was really, really special.”

Bradley banked some important feels from the MVC Championship, too, painful as a one-shot runner-up finish turned out to be.