BOONE

The phone started to ring before 5 in the morning.

Two hours early.

Then, the alarms.

Mid-Prairie seniors Gabi Robertson and Madi Davidson were snug in their beds at a hotel in Ames. It was a big day. Huge. Second day of the IHGSAU Class 2A girls golf state tournament. The final day of their high school golf careers.

Wake-up for a 9 a.m. first tee was around 6:30.

Dark skies intervened.

In a spring that seems to have been filled with the sounds of tornado sirens, that’s what happened early last Friday morning, May 24, in central Iowa, and as it so happened, about two hours before the same warnings from the same storms hit back home in Wellman and Kalona.

“It was pretty crazy,” Davidson said. “Nothing I’ve ever experienced before on this team.”

Hotel guests were hit with the warnings and alarms at 4:30 a.m., and were instructed to stay in their rooms. Six Golden Hawk golfers were in their rooms on the third, or top, floor. They headed for the safety of the stairwell, and then the rooms of their parents, who were on the first floor.

“We all went to the first floor and hung out with our parents ‘til about 6 o’clock,” Robertson said.

Chaos?

The Golden Hawks weren’t the only team staying overnight at the Ames Hilton Garden Inn, which was just a half hour from the site of the state golf tournament at Cedar Pointe Golf Course in Boone.

“The alarm goes off and the warnings go off,” said head coach Tracy McArtor. “You’re thinking, ‘OK, now do we even have to get up? Are we going to play?’”

One thought hit Gabi Robertson’s mind: “I can’t believe this is happening right now. Second day of state. We better not have to play now that we’re up at 4:30 in the morning.”

Oh, the storms.

A large line of storms cruised through the Ames area with rain and thunder, but no twisters. Two hours later, a couple of small tornadoes did drop from the skies closer to home, near Wellman and Frytown.

“A couple of the kids, I think, got a little nervous,” McArtor said.

By 6 a.m., just when the storms were closing in on Wellman, the “all clear” was on in Ames.

“We raided our parents’ rooms. Since nothing bad happened, it was kind of fun,” Davidson said.

 Back to sleep. But not for long.

“For about 5 to 10 minutes, we got some sleep,” Robertson said.

“That might have been about it for me, too,” McArtor said. “Seemed like just about the time I had nodded off, the phone buzzed again.”

It was tournament time.

The second day of the state tournament had a scheduled start of 9 a.m. Soggy fairways and all, that was the plan. Then, after the teams were already there with golf clubs in hand, tournament officials delayed the start an hour.

“I was like, the course is going to be soaked,” Robertson said. “There’s no way we’re playing.”

Oh, they played. And conditions changed dramatically from that 10 a.m. start underneath cloudy skies and wet fairways to the afternoon, when quickly drying greens made putts faster and faster at crucial times.

Robertson was coming off a day in which she shot a personal-best 84.

The Golden Hawks were in fifth place in the team standings.

And there they stayed.

Robertson shot an 85, just one off the PR she had set the previous day.

“I was relaxed all the way through,” she said. “Nerves never really got to me.”

Her two-day score of 169 equaled a mark posted by Mid-Prairie’s Kelsie Berg in 2009.

“It was fun to watch her play,” McArtor said. “She hit shot after shot today and yesterday with no worries, no pressure on her. It seemed like she was just having a good time.”

When she was done, Robertson joined up with Davidson and her other teammates around the clubhouse at Cedar Pointe as scores from around the course rolled in. Perfect blue skies. No storms.

They proudly climbed up a set of stairs to the clubhouse balcony to accept what may have been the first fifth-place state trophy in school history. The Golden Hawks did finish fourth in 2009 and 2010.

And then, they made plans for lunch on the way out of town.

And sleep. Finally.

This time, with a trophy.

News columnist Paul Bowker can be reached at bowkerpaul1@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @bowkerpaul