GOLF - Familiarity breeds third place for Masters

A good understanding of the Kerikeri Golf Course helped the Northland Masters team to an unlikely third place in the interprovincial championships on Sunday.
The team has come along way since their second-to-last at last year's championships in Auckland and team manager Mary Sorenson said their third-place was a result of careful planning.
"Overall, we're all very, very pleased with the performance, once you put it into perspective, we played extremely well to get third after finishing 13th last year," she said.
"Being able to have quite a lot of good practise on the course this year was definitely to our advantage and we owe thanks to the Kerikeri club for that.
"We reckoned beforehand that we had to get to 80 (stableford points) at least, in each round, to threaten the leaders and we achieved that," she said.
The team's consistency was a feature of their win. After the first round on Friday in the teams' event Northland were seventh, and they improved to sixth after the second round, remaining there after the third round - their poorest of the four - on Saturday.
A high-flying 88 saw them finish third-equal with Auckland after Sunday's final round. A nervous wait followed as the team realised there would be a countback to decide third place.
"They take the fourth non-counting scores of the round and compared them and Roz Fitzpatrick's 24 was better than her Auckland opposite's score of 22," Sorenson said.
The competition for first place was just as exciting with Taranaki gaining late momentum to take the Masters title for the first time.
Waikato's Robyn Pellow, a veteran interprovincial player, was the leading individual at the tournament, finishing on 125 points.
Sorenson said third place was a great result for the Northland team and it helped to erase last year's disappointing result.
"Everyone contributed to the win. I don't think you could say there were any standouts and nobody bombed out completely and that's the way a team should be."