SALISBURY — Rowan County Player of the Year Marlee Speir, a Salisbury High senior, believes she won the county golf championship on hole No. 11 at McCanless.

That’s a pretty short par 4, but while McCanless isn’t lengthy, it’s tight. Speir had struggled frequently in the past on 11, but this time she made a par.

“It’s always been a bad hole for me,” Speir said. “So that really helped.”

Speir remembers that she and East Rowan sophomore Ashlyn Pfister were neck-and-neck most of the day, but Speir was steady at the end, when nerves can come into play, got some separation on 17 and 18 and won by four shots. Speir shot 90. Pfister was runner-up at 94. Three other girls managed to break 100.

At least as important to Speir was that she led Salisbury to the team championship by a single stroke over Carson. Salisbury once totally dominated girls golf, even at the state level, but had not won a Rowan team title since 2015 when Grace Yatawara led the Hornets to victory at Warrior. Speir is Salisbury’s first Rowan County Player of the Year since Yatawara.

East had won every county championship since 2017, and while Carson provided a couple of individual county champs in the last decade, most of the champs have been Mustangs.

Speir took up golf for the first time as a seventh-grader at Salisbury Academy. The coach was Brian Lee, who has gotten a lot of Rowan girls interested in the game, so the Jaguars played home matches at Warrior where Lee is the pro.

Speier likes volleyball. When she got to high school, volleyball and girls golf were both fall sports. She opted to play volleyball.

She played volleyball for the Hornets for two seasons, but she decided to make a golf comeback her junior year, with the Hornets returning to the South Piedmont Conference after being away for decades.

“We had fun playing, but we didn’t have a very good golf team last year,” Speir said. “We wanted it more this year and took it a lot more seriously. We saw from the first match that we had a chance to compete in the county. That wasn’t the case last year when East had so many good seniors.”

Speir shot a 45 to lead Salisbury to a nine-hole win against county and conference opponents early in the season. That gave the Hornets some confidence. All year long, there wasn’t much difference between Salisbury, East, Carson and South Rowan in the nine-hole matches.

In the 18-hole South Piedmont Conference Tournament conducted at Sapona in Lexington, Speir shot 97 and finished second to Robinson’s Ava Mason, who was, by far, the SPC’s best golfer. Mason tied for 10th in the 5A State Championships.

“I wasn’t unhappy with a 97 at Sapona,” Speir said. “That’s a hard course.”

The season ended quietly for Speir. The 4A classification was pretty tough in girls golf. Speir and South’s Sawyer Sherrill were the only SPC girls to qualify for the regional.

In 5A, it was somewhat easier to advance, as East and Carson were able to qualify enough girls to post regional team scores. East’s Pfister and Carson freshman Lileebeth Jolly qualified to play in the state tournament.

Speir shot 104 in the regional held at Cedar Rock in Lenoir, so her season ended there.

“It was still an enjoyable season,” Speir said. “There aren’t that many girls in the county playing golf, so you get to meet them all and I got to play with a lot of them. I made a lot of friends.”

Speir isn’t sure what’s coming next year, as she’s sending in college applications now. She’s a strong student, so her dream schools of UNC and Wake Forest are realistic destinations.

All-Rowan County

The 9-person team was determined by the results of the Rowan County Championship.

• Salisbury — Marlee Speir, Adalyn Yost

• East Rowan — Ashlyn Pfister

• South Rowan — Sawyer Sherrill, Berkley Brown

• Carson — Hestergrace Covington, Lileebeth Jolly, McKinley Mullis

• West Rowan — Waylan Collins

• Player of the Year — Speir, Salisbury

• Coach of the Year — Hunter Fuller, Salisbury