Wednesday, May 4, 2005 | 9:41 a.m.
The top eight teams and top two individuals not on qualifying teams advance to the NCAA Championship, scheduled for May 18-21 at Sunriver, Ore.
Tell a college girl that she has fanglike teeth, a projecting lower jaw and, of all things, an elongated cylindrical body at your own peril.
Those are the dictionary terms that describe a barracuda, a "voracious marine fish" famous for being a nasty predator in tropical waters.
They don't call Elena Kurokawa any of these physically disparaging terms, and they shorten barracuda to simply "Cuda," the nickname by which UNLV women's golf coach Missy Ringler almost exclusively refers to her best player.
While the nickname doesn't fit Kurokawa's understated personality, it fits the game she is displaying this spring as she elevates from supporting act to headliner for the Rebels. After two years of backing up All-American Sunny Oh's efforts as UNLV's top golfer, Kurokawa improved her game enough in the past year to replace Oh and follow her as Mountain West Conference tournament champion and player of the year in just her junior season.
Yet Kurokawa, as shy in words as she is aggressive on the course, simply won't call herself the Rebels' No. 1 player despite the obvious evidence. Her scoring average of 74.24 is more than two stokes better than that of any other Rebel and she has only missed the top 10 in a tournament once since November.
As the Rebels prepare for the NCAA West Regional that begins Thursday in Las Cruces, N.M., much of the responsibility for repeating last year's first-ever trip to nationals falls to Cuda.
"I try not to think about it that much," Kurokawa said. "I just go out there and take one shot at a time. In that past, I was thinking about what I'm going to shoot today or what I'm going to shoot on the back nine or something. I've learned to just take what I have in front of me and just give it my all."
Her all used to be what Kurokawa tossed at the course in the hope that her wealth of natural talent could always produce an eye-popping score. That haphazard formula produced no wins and plenty of inconsistency in her first two years at UNLV. She followed a 71 with an 85 at regionals as a freshman, and chased a 73 with an 87 at last year's home tournament.
Kurokawa posted just one top-five finish before this season. Her career scoring average hovered a shade shy of 77, a score that isn't winning anything against the competition that UNLV regularly faces. Yet with Oh fronting the team, it was enough.
But only enough, and no more.
"I really think that she, in the last two years, probably hasn't played to her ability," Ringler said. "For her to start doing this now is not surprising. I think a lot of it was mental. I've always said that Elena was kind of a birdie-chaser."
On par
"Chasing birdies" is not much of a compliment to a golfer. It means a player gets nervous after making a bogey, or worse, and tries to rush back to make up for it with a birdie. Here's haste, there's waste and that's how you add 14 strokes in a day.
"I think my problem is I'm too aggressive on the greens," Kurokawa said. "I think when I want birdie too much, it ends up being bogey sometimes. That's what kind of killed me before, but I've learned to control that and just to be conservative and realize that par is a good score."
She paused for a beat, then smiled and bared her soul.
"But I love birdies. That's why I play."
That's the Cuda in her coming out. The truth of the nickname is that UNLV teammate Seema Sadekar had trouble pronouncing Kurokawa's last name when they first met and Sadekar somehow came up with something that sounded like "Cuda-Kawa." The first part stuck and the 20-year-old girl who craves the privacy of her off-campus apartment, the one her coach calls "caring" and "sweet," became a predator, even if only for red numbers.
She's a psychology major, though Kurokawa has no idea what she might do with the degree because she wants to be a professional golfer. But her talent wasn't translating to the course often enough, so a little more than a year ago, Kurokawa offered the psychological task of melding her need for par and love for birdie to Gary Knapp.
Knapp, the director of instruction at Reflection Bay at Lake Las Vegas, overhauled Kurokawa's game. A new takeaway, new motion at the top of the swing, new putting alignment -- Knapp left little untouched, notably Kurokawa's head.
Born in Tokyo and raised in Southern California, she only started playing at 13 years old, so it did not take many coats of paint for Knapp to cover up Kurokawa's old habits. They spend plenty of time at the driving range, but just as much on the course, where Knapp added sophistication to Kurokawa's talent by teaching her how to avoid trouble or make the best of it when she cannot.
Perhaps most importantly, Knapp helped drive home Ringler's advice that par can be a winning score. The matches that Knapp and Kurokawa occasionally play have come down to one or two holes, and par can be plenty to get that edge.
"She needs a lot more experience, but she's come a long way in a year," Knapp said. "She's not afraid, not afraid to compete. Some people probably get nervous, but she wants to win."
Old habits
A barracuda is not just going to change its attacking ways without a proven alternative, though. It's been eating that way for years. Kurokawa carried her old attitude into this year and proceeded to shoot over par in eight of her first nine rounds.
The Rebels struggled at the start of the fall season as a team, bottoming out at the Stanford Invitational in October by finishing 16th out of 18 teams. Without Oh, who left after her sophomore year, Ringler felt there was no natural leader on her team and no one to take the pressure off a group of players who had not felt it at this level.
"I think it's more me than it is them," Ringler said of wanting a clear No. 1 player. "Knowing the team I got back, having four out of the five players from last year's team back, I knew full well that we'd be a great team."
"So having the ups and downs that we've had this year, from my perspective, that's what I needed to see -- one player kind of step to the role of being that consistent No. 1, somebody who's going to shoot around par every time. In my eyes, having that happen, I knew the rest of the team would follow suit and play better because of it."
Kurokawa finished 67th out of 91 players at Stanford with a dismal 22-over total. It was after that tournament when the birdie chaser started to accept a new identity as a par apologist. There was no magic moment when it clicked, nothing more than the frustration of the old way failing once again.
"It was definitely hard for me because I think, coming down the stretch especially, I try to get birdies coming in," Kurokawa said. "It's hard to lag a putt instead of going for it. It's hard for me, but it definitely pays off."
It began paying off with a fifth-place finish at the home event at Anthem Country Club in November. Teammate Hwanhee Lee won that tournament, but Kurokawa quickly jumped to the forefront in the spring season. Her past five starts have resulted in a win at the conference tournament at 1-over 214, as well as a second, a fourth and two ties for eighth.
Her scoring average during that stretch of nearly three months is 72.86, or right around par as Ringler wants from her top player. Oops -- forgot that Kurokawa doesn't like that term.
"That wouldn't be fair to the team," Kurokawa said.
Nor does Kurokawa really want to see herself as the team leader, Ringler feels.
"Not in a negative way, but I wouldn't say that she's an extreme leader," Ringler said. "I would say that she's somebody who's going to get the job done."
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