Staff photo by Travis Rosenau Minnesota Valley Lutheran’s Ben Pearson competes on the first hole at Winthrop Golf Club during the third leg of the Tomahawk Conference Golf Tournament on Monday.

WINTHROP — Minnesota Valley Lutheran senior Ben Pearson knew that staying steady and controlling what was in front of him was key Monday in the third and final leg of the Tomahawk Conference Golf Tournament.

Shaking off a tough first nine holes at Winthrop Golf Club, Pearson cleaned things up to take home his first Tomahawk Conference individual golf championship.

Holding the first-place points position after the first two legs and heading into the final leg, it was Pearson’s tourney for the taking. That didn’t mean he didn’t see several hungry challengers make a push Monday for that top spot.

Pearson carded a 42 on his first nine holes in Winthrop before rebounding with a 38 to finish tied for first on the day with an 80, giving him 74.5 points to take home the conference title.

While a 42 on a nine-hole, par-36 course is a great score for many golfers, it wasn’t enough to allow Pearson to breathe easy. But Pearson wasn’t worrying either.

“I just told myself, ‘One shot at a time,'” Pearson said. “And just concentrate on the things that you can control. You can’t control other players, you’ve got to play well for yourself, you can’t hope that somebody else plays bad. Control what I can control and just tell myself, ‘One shot at a time.'”

Tying Pearson for first on the day was Springfield’s Braiden Davis. Davis’s turnaround in the tournament was part of a combined turnaround by the Tigers’ golf team that saw them leap to the top of the conference race and finish as conference champions.

With points being worth double Monday, the Tigers finished first for the second round in a row with a 340 score, finishing with 29 team points ahead of New Ulm Cathedral (27) and MVL (25). MVL took second on Monday with a 341, followed by Cathedral (342), Cedar Mountain (348), Sleepy Eye United (358), Buffalo Lake-Hector-Stewart (377) and Gibbon-Fairfax-Winthrop (395).

Cedar Mountain finished fourth overall in the tournament (20), followed by SEU (19), BLHS (11) and GFW (9). Wabasso was incomplete.

The Tigers opened the tourney in New Ulm with a fourth-place finish, but they responded with a first-place finish at Oakdale Golf Club in the second leg before closing out with another first-place finish in Winthrop to take the title.

In addition to tying for first on Monday, Davis also finished first overall at Oakdale in the second leg. But the first leg of the tournament saw him shot a 98 at the New Ulm Country Club to tie him for 23rd place.

“It feels pretty good,” Davis said. “We didn’t do so well the first conference meet and then the last two, we really turned it up and we’ve played some good golf to get where we’re at today.”

Davis said avoiding triple and double bogeys during the second and third legs were key in getting to where he ended up, which was third overall in the tournament with 59 points.

“Not blowing up on holes [was key],” Davis said. “Getting out of there with a bogey instead of a triple and getting some pars in there, not doubling and tripling.”

Davis’s teammate Ben Potter shot an 81 on Monday for third, giving him 64 total points for the tournament to take second. Cedar Mountain’s Carson Schiller shot an 82 to take fourth on Monday, followed by BLHS’s Chase Hubin (83), GFW’s Cole Jacobson (84), SEU’s Kaleb Weiss (84), Cathedral’s Joey Fingland (84) and Cedar Mountain’s Blake Schueller (85). Tying for 10th on Monday with 86s were Cathedral’s Owen Strei, MVL’s James Osterman, Springfield’s Easton Jensen and Cathedral’s Will Marti and Ben Blomberg. Springfield’s Noah Vogel shot a 93 to finish 27th and complete Springfield’s score card.

With the Tomahawk Conference and Valley Conference combining next year and MVL leaving the Tomahawk all together next year, Pearson gets to punch his name in the record books a MVL’s last golfer to win a Tomahawk title.

“It was a good way to finish for us because we have a lot of seniors in our class,” Pearson said. “We had four out of the six varsity guys are seniors and then the other two are juniors. So for us as seniors to be able to play pretty well and take third — we were one shot away today from taking first. That would have been pretty cool, but we played well and, like I said, as seniors, it was nice to play well at the end.”

For tournament placement, Fingland finished fourth overall with 57 points, while Marti took fifth (46.5), Blomberg took sixth (46), Strei took seventh (44.5), Weiss took eighth (42.5), Schueller took ninth (40.5) and Schiller took 10th (40).