Today and tomorrow, the boys golf team will travel to the Prairie View Golf Club in Carmel to compete in the state championship, where 17 other teams will be vying for a season culminating in a victory.

The team, which was ranked sixth going into the postseason, has been buoyed by a recent surge in momentum that started in their victory in the county tournament, which has carried over into the playoffs, where they have placed first in the sectional and regional.

“I would say a moment that defined our season is the county tournament. We started to get hot at this time and saw some lower scores among the five of us, giving us confidence going into the final tournaments of our season,” senior Drew Hardin said.

Confidence will be key as the Trojans will go against opposition like Homestead, Westfield and Evansville North. Westfield finished as last year’s runner up and has consistently performed as the number one ranked golf team in the state.

“They are all solid teams,” senior Noah Parsetich said. “Our key to beating them is really to not worry about what they are doing and play our own game. We can’t decide what they do, so we have to do the best that we can and hopefully that is good enough to beat them.”

Something that will complicate performance at Prairie View will be the landscape of the course, making technical ability extremely important at the tee and the green.

“There is a ton of trouble everywhere off the tee and around the greens [like] water, sand, heather [and] trees. Every part of your game needs to be good in order to score around there,” Hardin said.

Focus will play a big part in the Trojans’ strategy today. The players will look to play their individual games and support each other in order to keep their momentum going.

“It is very important to make sure that everyone is in a good mindset. It’s important that we lift each other up because it’s a team sport and we need all of us in order to win,” Hardin said. “My individual key is staying in the moment, playing one shot at a time and controlling what I can control. For this course you need everything to be clicking in order to succeed, so spending time in each area in order to see good results is important.”

While they will be going against several high-quality opponents ranked above them, the Trojans will look to compete and better their performance from last year, where they finished fifth, three strokes away from fourth. With a group that has played together for the past six years, a state championship will be in play.

“A state championship would mean everything,” Parsetich said. “It is what we all work for all four years of playing. Countless hours practicing inside, outside, with our coaches, it would truly mean the world for a state championship to come back to Center Grove this year.”