Smyth Carries Momentum Into Second Year
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By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com
CHARLOTTESVILLE –– Ria Scott’s second team at the University of Virginia will look considerably different from her first.
The Cavaliers capped their first year under Scott by placing 14th at the NCAA women’s golf championships in May. Three of the top four scorers on the team were seniors, however, and the departures of Anna Redding, Katharine Patrick and Morgan Gonzales left a large hole in the lineup.
Still, Scott believes those who follow the program are “going to be pleasantly surprised. I think there’s so much unknown about what this squad can do that there’s also going to be a lot of excitement because of it.”
Beth Lillie, whose stroke average of 73.26 was second only to Redding’s 72.85 at UVA last season, is back for her junior year, and Scott expects freshmen Virginia Bossi and Celese Valinho to contribute immediately. Bossi, who’s from Italy, enters the 2019-20 school year as the top Cavalier in the world amateur rankings.
“She could be a really interesting factor for us this year,” Scott said.
And then there are the returning players who, unlike Lillie, do not have a significant body of work at the collegiate level. That group includes Riley Smyth, a sophomore who at this time last summer was recovering from surgery to repair a torn labrum in her left hip. She underwent the same operation on her right hip in June 2017.
Smyth, who’s from Cary, N.C., is healthy now and has had a terrific summer.
In June, she was the runner-up at the 93rd annual Carolinas Women’s Amateur Championship in Charlotte, N.C. In July, she advanced to the finals before losing at the 22nd annual Carolinas Women’s Match Play Championship in Greenville, S.C.
“For Riley to put herself in these positions, especially after all that she’s been through, recovering from her injury, I think it’s phenomenal,” said Scott, who came to Virginia last summer after nine seasons as Oregon’s head coach.
“I think Riley, her parents and her coaches would say she is on an incredibly aggressive track considering where she was this time last summer. This time last summer she was just starting to hit full shots after that second hip surgery.”
Smyth, a graduate of Cardinal Gibbons High School in Raleigh, N.C., did not compete for the Wahoos last fall. After the calendar flipped to 2019, she played in seven events for UVA. In her 20 rounds, her stroke average was 75.70, fifth-best on the team.
“In golf, as with any other sport, you can practice as much as you want, but until you’re back competing, you really can’t replicate how you have to be mentally and physically,” Smyth said. “And so it did take a couple months, but I think around the end of March, beginning of April, I definitely really started to see a turn in my game.”
Her best round of the season came at the NCAA’s Auburn regional, where she shot 2-under par 70.
“It’ll definitely be nice to be healthy this year, just because for the past two years I’ve been recovering come fall and winter,” Smyth said.
Her summer showing “gives me a lot of confidence going into this season,” she said, “just because it really does give me a basis of strong play and strong finishes, and with [the final rounds of the NCAA championships] being match play, I think it is a positive being able to win those matches under pressure.”
One of her UVA teammates, sophomore Haeley Wotnosky, advanced to the semifinals of the Carolinas Women’s Match Play Championship before losing to College of Charleston senior Victoria Huskey, who beat Smyth 1-up in the final later that day.
Wotnosky missed last season for medical reasons, but once she and Smyth “got cleared, they have not stopped working or competing,” Scott said. “So I think both of those gals are up for the challenge [in 2019-20].”
She didn’t see Wotnosky much in Greenville, because they teed off at different times, Smyth said, but “it definitely would have a really interesting final if we had met.”
Smyth was born in New Jersey, where her parents were raised, and lived her there until the summer before her freshman year of high school, when the family moved to Cary.
She still has some Jersey in her, Smyth said, “but I’m definitely a little bit more of a North Carolinian now.”
Smyth has three brothers, all older than she is, who attended Notre Dame, Richmond and Villanova, respectively. The family has no ties to UVA, but “I had visited with one of my brothers when he was looking at colleges, about four years before I started looking, and I fell in love with it then,” Smyth said. “I ended up coming back on one of my [unofficial] visits, and I loved everything about Grounds, and I loved the coaches and loved the team, and it was the perfect fit for me academically and athletically.”
She committed to Virginia midway through her sophomore year of high school. Smyth expected to play for head coach Kim Lewellen at UVA, but she left in June 2018 to take the same position at Wake Forest.
Even so, Smyth said, she loved her first year of college, on and off the golf course.
“It was great,” said Smyth, who plans to apply to UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce. “It was definitely a learning experience, just coming in and being the young one on Grounds, and just being able to soak in the experiences and be able to learn from my older teammates and everything.”
Her primary goal for the coming year, Smyth said, is to help the Hoos win the program’s first NCAA title, “but I would like to be able to step up as a leader on the team, just because we do have a little bit of a younger team this year. We graduated so many that it will be a different atmosphere on the team this year.”
The Cavaliers also have a new assistant coach, Marissa Dodd. She succeeded Calle Nielson, who left in June to become head coach at Richmond.
“We’re really excited,” Scott said. “I think our players are ready to step up and see who the new leaders are going to be. We did have such strong leadership from the fourth-years last year, but I also think them graduating is going to give our younger ones this opportunity to be those leaders.”