By MATT GOLDBERG
Herald-Whig Sports Writer
Rachel Powers played the Weibring Golf Club like it was her home course on Monday and Tuesday, winning the two-day Country Youth Classic by eight strokes.
Soon enough, she will call it home.
Powers, the Quincy Notre Dame senior, verbally committed to Illinois State University on Sunday after receiving a full-ride scholarship offer.
"I had other offers, but Illinois State made me feel like I was at home," Powers said.
And there's a good chance she'll play right away, considering ISU has four seniors on its roster for 2009-10.
"I definitely wanted to go on to a team that I could play at," Powers said. "... (ISU coach Darby Sligh) said that I would definitely be able to play there. And I think that's great."
Sligh and Powers already have something in common -- both competed against boys during their high school golf careers.
"So it was kind of cool how we have the same kind of thing," Powers said. "So she knows how it is and she liked how I played the longer distances and what I shot and everything. She was pretty impressed about it."
Powers played on the QND girls team as a freshman and sophomore, finishing 42nd at the Class AA state tournament as a sophomore, but low numbers forced QND to fold the girls program last fall.
It left Powers with two options -- play as in individual in the girls state tournament series or join the QND boys team. She decided to tee it up with the guys, possibly limiting her exposure to some college recruiters.
"We did think that it would kind of hurt me because none of the (women's) coaches would be looking at the guys play if they were looking for girls," Powers said. "I just sent them e-mails and told them that (I was) playing on the boys team. So I had a couple of them come out and watch me during the guys matches."
This fall, QND expects to have enough girls to field a golf team, thanks to an influx of freshmen. So Powers will be back playing with the girls, hoping to make a return trip to the state tournament.
"To go back to the girls, it's going to be so much different," Powers said. " It's so much shorter and I'm going to have to work on different clubs than I used last year. It's different. But it's going to challenge me."
Luckily, the challenge of choosing a college is out of the way.
"I'm really excited and I'm glad that I have no pressure on me anymore -- that I can just go out and have fun for the rest of the summer knowing that I already have my school picked out," Powers said.
--mgoldberg@whig.com/221-3367
