Bakersfield College men’s golf team had a tough start in the Western State Conference mini-tournament and ended up in seventh place out of seven teams.

The WSC mini-tournament was on Feb. 6. Canyons took first place with a score of 399 and BC had 414.

Although BC fell to seventh place, only 14 strokes separated them from first place, and only five strokes separated the first place team from the fifth place team.

“Our conference is really competitive, and maybe if we made some shots here and there we would’ve placed higher,” said BC coach Bill Kalivas.

Kalivas commented on the team’s performance.

“We have an all-freshmen team, so it’s going to take some time,” he said. “We had a good strategy, things just didn’t go our way. I like how there is good competition between our players and everyone competing with each other is going to help us to get better as a team. I would like to see us improve on shot making and that will help us out a lot.”

Kalivas also commented what the difference is between this year’s all-freshmen team to last year’s team.

“Well, I think this year collectively as a whole they’re working hard as a team and making sure they talk about the team strategy,” he said. “Last year we had more individual talents, but it made it harder to come up with a team strategy.”

He added that he’s been really been impressed with Jack Henneberry and Neil Bautista, who both are from Centennial High School.  Matt Deford, Travis Millwee, Brandon Pinuelas, Max Schmidt, Carlos Fernandez and Kevin Antongiovanni are some of the other golfers he’s been impressed with.

“I think over the last couple weeks they’ve progressed well,” he said.

BC’s next golf match will be the WSC meet at Rio Bravo Country Club on Feb. 27.