A common theme among the Marshalltown High School spring sports this season has been the anticipation of getting back into competition after missing the 2020 seasons due to COVID-19 and the pandemic.

Tuesday afternoon, the Bobcats’ girls’ golf team gets to make their return to the course.

Marshalltown will visit Ankeny in its season-opening meet, with the team’s first home meet coming Thursday in a dual meet against Ankeny Centennial at Elmwood Country Club.

Head coach Lucas Johnson said the team is ready to go.

“Our girls feel like there’s some unfinished business that they didn’t get a chance to compete last year,” Johnson said. “We were really looking forward to last season, knowing we had a real good core.”

The Bobcats are lucky, in that they have four returning varsity golfers from the 2019 season — Amber Henson, Kyra Feldman, Brynn Van Buren and Norah Wilson.

Henson is a co-captain for the Bobcats and was the leading scorer for the team in 2019, averaging 41 per nine holes with a season-best score of 75 at the Des Moines Golf and Country Club.

Despite not playing school golf in 2020, the junior was plenty active on the course. Henson participated in junior events across Iowa and played in the Iowa Women’s Amateur, defeating golfers who were collegiate golfers at the Division I level, Johnson said.

“As she’s heading into her junior year, the sky’s the limit for her,” Johnson said. “She’s somebody that is going to put in as much work as it takes to get better. The thing that I’ve noticed about her game from her freshman year until now is how much stronger she’s gotten, and how far she’s hitting the ball now.”

Henson was a 1st Team All-State player in 2019, one of four freshmen to make the list.

As the other co-captain and the only senior on the roster, Kyra Feldman is a multi-sport athlete for the Bobcats who is aiming to bring a lot of leadership to the team. Johnson said her experience at the varsity level in multiple sports, as well as a year of practice and hopeful improvement, is going to be big for Marshalltown.

Feldman averaged a nine-hole score of 47.7, with a best nine-hole score of 45.

Norah Wilson and Brynn Van Buren are the team’s two other returning starters. Both juniors, Wilson and Van Buren are in their fourth year of being around the golf program, Johnson said. That experience will be key, as the duo were the team’s fourth-and-fifth best scorers in 2019.

Johnson said there’s unknowns about the opposition they’re facing from the get-go.

“We don’t know what other schools are going to have,” Johnson said. “A thing we’ve stressed to the girls, especially at this part of the season, is just to play your own game.”