HENRYVILLE

Owen Marshall’s regional golf debut won’t go down as one of the best rounds of his life, but the Seymour sophomore had enough good come out of Thursday’s trip around Champions Pointe Golf Club to lay a solid foundation for the next two seasons.

Marshall recovered from a choppy start to come in with a round of 79, seven shots over par. Considering how few putts he got to drop for him, he was fine with the end result.

“You just take out of it that I’m good enough to come down here and compete with these guys,” Marshall said. “I definitely didn’t have all my stuff today, and I still hung in there and put a pretty decent score on the board.”

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Marshall had some troubles out of the gate, finding himself at 4 over par through four holes. He regrouped by finishing the front nine with five consecutive pars to make the turn at 40.

The big sticking point during that early stretch was a double bogey on the par-5 third hole, where he had a ball bounce off of the cart path and out of bounds. Marshall, though, was able to shake it off and right the ship.

“That’s golf,” he said. “You’ve just got to recover, recuperate and make a shot.”

Marshall finally got a putt to drop on the difficult par-4 18th, getting up and down for par to keep himself in the 70s, but overall, the greens weren’t giving him many breaks.

“He was around the hole the whole day, just nipping the edges,” Seymour coach Jim Hoffman said. “He did everything well. He just couldn’t get the putts to go in.”

Though his season came to an end one stop short of the ultimate goal of making the state finals, both Marshall and his coach took plenty of positives out of this maiden regional voyage.

“The experience is great,” Hoffman said. “We hope to get the team back here next year, but as an individual experience for him, it’s great, and it really bodes well for his confidence and where he has come the last couple of months.”