Jade Haylock chips the ball on the 13th hole Thursday at the Maine Junior Championship at Fairlawn Golf and Country Club. She got off to a rough start to her second round in the girls’ 13-15 group, but played better on the back nine during the rain and won. Anna Gouveia/Sun Journal
POLAND — The toughest competitor at Fairlawn Golf Course on Thursday for the final round of the Maine Junior Golf Championship was the rain that came in as the early groups were making the turn and the final groups were just teeing off.
It made playing catch-up even more difficult than usual, and each first-round leader held on for victory.
Sisters Ruby and Jade Haylock, of Hartford, didn’t have to sweat in their group victories. Jade got off to a rough start to her second round in the girls’ 13-15 group, but said she played better on the back nine during the rain.
“I play in the rain quite often. I mean, it’s something that I do well in,” Jade Haylock said. “I don’t have a problem with the rain.”
She followed up her first-round 83 with an 11-over 84 in Thursday’s final round to beat runner-up Alexis McCormick, her friend and future Leavitt Area High School teammate.
Two groups later, Ruby Haylock finished up her win in the girls’ 16-18 group with a nine-shot victory over friend and former Leavitt teammate Morghan Dutil. Haylock wasn’t thrilled with her two-day score of 6-over 152, which included a 5-over 78 Thursday, with half of that coming in the rain.
“The greens, I had a harder time reading the speed of them. They tended to be a little bit slower, and then as the rain died off they started getting a little bit more consistent,” Haylock said. “But it’s hard when everything’s wet and you’re trying to stay dry yourself.”
Ruth Weeks of Cumberland finished third with a 166.
Dutil made her comeback attempt difficult early in the second round when she hit her first shot on hole No. 1 into a hazard and three-putted each of the first three holes. After that it was just about focusing on each shot the rest of the way.
Kellen Adickes tried to focus on one shot at a time in his comeback attempt in the boys’ 14-15 group, but couldn’t completely erase the six-shot deficit against first-round leader and eventual champion Eli Spaulding of Freeport. He finished two shots back.
“I don’t feel like I ran out of holes, I know it was just a lack of concentration after the conditions changed,” said Adickes, of Bristol and Lincoln Academy. “Just trying to keep the momentum going after, especially, a pause (on the back nine to wait to hit a shot). In the rough conditions, it was still not impossible, but it was definitely more difficult to be able to do it.”
Spaulding built his big lead in the first round by being aggressive. He realized early in the second round that plan wasn’t going to work. He double-bogeyed the second hole and hit bogeys on Nos. 5 and 7, but finished with 11 consecutive pars for a two-day score of 3-under 141.
“I started to feel comfortable once I started to hit more greens in regulation. I was finding more fairways and my iron shots really were starting to look more like what they did yesterday,” Spaulding said. “And I was hitting these greens, and my putting began to get better and I was going for the two-putt. I was trying to make pars and stay away from those bogeys.”
Parker Hilchey also stopped playing for birdies and instead focused on making pars to win the boys’ 16-18 group title.
The St. George native entered Thursday with a four-shot lead over Connor Albert of North Yarmouth, but Albert got within two shots on the back nine. Hilchey closed with a birdie on No. 17 and a par on No. 18 for a 3-over 147 and a three-shot victory.
Neil LaRochelle of Lisbon was also in the final group, but an 81 in the second round dropped him to 11th place for the tournament.
Joe Hansen won the boys’ 12-13 group, Drew Mertzel won the boys’ 11-under group, and Niamh O’Brien won the girls’ 13-under group.
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