Cale Hoover can hit a golf ball a pretty decent distance — but when the Center Grove girls coach goes out to play practice rounds with his team, there is usually one player that can outdistance him off of the tee.
Not many high school girls are capable of pulling out their drivers and launching 300-yard bombs out into the fairway, but the Trojans have one at the top of their lineup in Meg Fosnot.
"We’ve got a lot of talented players," Hoover said. "The difference with Meg is the power. Meg is an incredibly dynamic striker of the golf ball. … It is very much different than the rest of our team. It’s a very explosive game."
That explosiveness figures to come in handy today when Fosnot and the the fifth-ranked Trojans attempt to defend their Johnson County tournament championship at The Legends.
The battle for the crown has been heated in recent years, with Center Grove edging Franklin by four strokes last August and the Grizzly Cubs beating the Trojans by the same margin in 2018.
Fosnot’s length off the tee gives her a big head start on opposing players on the par-4 and par-5 holes.
"I can outhit the girls, on average, 100 yards," she said, "so I’d have a wedge into the green and they’d have a 7 or 8 iron. That obviously makes it easier to put it closer to the pin."
Fosnot used that extra distance to great advantage during the summer, winning seven tournaments on the IGA Junior Tour and seven others on the Indianapolis Junior Tour. She claimed both series championships.
Along the way, she fired a career-best 68 during a July tourney at Smock Golf Course, site of the regional that the Trojans hope to advance out of a month from now.
"It’s definitely given me a lot of confidence," Fosnot said of her recent success, "especially since I broke into the 60s this summer, so I’m feeling really good about the season. Going into it, I worked a lot on my short game … which has allowed me to get those lower scoring averages."
The Trojans will need some low scores to hold off the ninth-ranked Grizzly Cubs on Wednesday, but they’ve got plenty of girls capable of delivering them. Any of Center Grove’s players could lead the team on a given day; Hoover believes he has more talent this season than ever before.
That depth should, in theory, take some pressure off of Fosnot — she doesn’t have to put up a low number for the Trojans to win. The senior, though, maintains the same urgency as she would feel if she had to carry a bigger load.
"It’s definitely nice to have that (depth) behind me," Fosnot said, "but I still feel mainly the same, because if I can shoot low and they can shoot low on the same day, then our team’s just that much better. So I still keep that pressure on for the most part, because I want to be that low score for the team, but if someone else gets it, it’s just fantastic."
The back-and-forth rivalry that Center Grove and Franklin have had the past three seasons adds another chapter today, and it’s likely to be an interesting one. The teams finished dead even in a tourney at Smock on Saturday, with the Grizzly Cubs claiming the tiebreaker.
Fosnot obviously wants to finish her last county tournament with a trophy in hand, but she’s quick to note that the feud with Franklin is ultimately a friendly one.
"It’s very competitive, we’re clashing," she said, "but then once we’re off the golf course, it’s like, ‘Oh, hey buddy, you did well today.’"
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Johnson County tournament
When: 1 p.m. (shotgun start)
Where: The Legends
Defending champion: Center Grove
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