D-NH boys secure first team state berth in school history

On the final hole at his final home meet and what could’ve been the end of his high school golf career, Dike-New Hartford senior Bo Weissenfluh needed to come up big for his teammates. He’d hunkered down, locked in and shot two under par on the back nine before launching a second stroke chip on the par four hole from over 150 yards away. It landed three feet from the pin.
 
“I just felt like I was in a different zone than what I was on the front nine,” he said.
 
With that birdie and a stellar all-around performance, Weissenfluh paced the senior-heavy Wolverines—and the field at large—with an 18-hole score of 72 as he earned medalist honors and propelled the school to its first state tournament berth ever. D-NH finished with a team score of 322, which was good for second place and just a stroke behind district champion Roland-Story at Fox Ridge on Friday afternoon.
 
“Right from the very beginning of the year, I knew this team had a chance. It was just whether we could get through it,” head coach Tim Kopriva said.
 
Fellow senior Ben Freese, normally the number two golfer, broke his hand last Tuesday and finished with an 87, but he was still glad to be on the course alongside his teammates with a chance to move on to Marshalltown.
 
“He gutted it out, and he tried,” Kopriva said of Freese. “That’s how much he wanted to play.”
 
And for a group of guys who’d been together since elementary school, Freese felt he owed it to them.
 
“I knew that if I had to battle through it for the team, I was going to do it no matter what,” he said. “This was our only chance to go, and now that we made it, it was well worth it… It hurt, but it was worth it.” 
 
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