Golf: Knights look to avoid trap game against Frederick

By Ben Spector
Winning After MidKnight

                         

The Middletown High School Knights Golf team is a team that is on the move upwards. After rattling off three wins with a relative degree of ease the Knights can look into the future at a tri-match that involves the Linganore High School Lancers and view that as a solid measuring stick game for the Knights, helping them determine where they step up with the top level teams in this area.

The Knights though can’t look to far ahead as standing in that path, is a match-up against the Frederick High School Cadets, which would on paper seem to favor Middletown but also has all the makings of a trap game for the Knights to fall into and take an embarrassing loss.

Middletown is the better team on paper without any doubt or any conjecture, but even taking that into account the Knights are not in a definitive win situation for a litany of reasons.

The most important reason is that the quality of Clustered Spires Golf Course could be a massive question mark for both teams. Clustered Spires, although in good shape did take on massive amounts of rain the night before will at least cause the course to play slower on the greens to some degree and if not overall.

Most of the Frederick area was still drying out from last night’s rain and with the large quantity that fell on Frederick last night, the greens will be much slower due to the amount of condensed water still laying thick on the greens.

This means that the Knights will have to be precise in their short game again as in their past losses, the short game has been what has done the nights in and caused their scorecard totals to rise exponentially.

Also, elevating this game to official “trap game” status is the fact that the Knights could easily overlook today’s match against the Cadets, one of the teams in th Central Maryland Conference who has been struggling the most, in order to get a better look at the Linganore Lancers who will be Middletown’s direct competition for the Central Maryland Conference title.

This would be a catastrophic mistake for the Knights. Middletown has built their current momentum off of stringing together wins while playing excellent golf and a lost to the Cadets would not only mean that all the momentum that Middleton had is gone but that they would’ve had to have played rough golf for them to take the loss.

The Knights have also played well enough in similar situations to lead someone to conclude that they might not fall into the trap after all. Earlier in the season, the Knights played Boonsboro and Brunswick before playing Wesminster but easily dispatched both the Railroaders and the Warriors, with almost a two stroke margin separating the first place Knights from the second place Warriors.

For, the Cadets this would be a hallmark victory as the last time that Frederick defeated the Knights was back during the 2012 season at the Frederick Veterans of Foreign Wars Golf Club, with the Middletown team of 2012 doing exactly what the Knights are trying to avoid here.

And, if Middletown can win then they can switch their focus towards Linganore and the kind of game that won’t surprise you at all.