The Iowa women’s golf team turned in its best performance of the season on Sunday at the Hawkeyes’ only home tournament.

Iowa placed fifth out of 13 teams at the Hawkeye Invitational on Finkbine Golf Course over the weekend.

Event winner Missouri State sandwiched two great rounds around one poor one, finishing with a team score of 914. The Bears were the only team to shoot under 300 in an individual round, doing so twice.

Illinois grabbed second, finishing four strokes behind the victor, and Iowa State — the highest ranked team entering the tournament — took third-place back to Ames.

Iowa freshman Kristi Cardwell led the Hawkeyes in the first round with an impressive score of 72, even par for the course. That round put her on top of the individual leaderboard after the opening 18 holes and was the second lowest score of the entire tournament.

“The first round, I was in a zone I couldn’t get out of, and I was playing great,” she said. “I got into the second round and once one bad thing happened, it just kept going. It was hard to get back from that. I brought it back Sunday, but it was tougher conditions because the wind was really strong.”

The Hawkeyes’ round-one team score of 306 was their lowest of the season. Part of that strong start could be attributed to home-course advantage.

Before the tournament head coach Kelly Crawford said she thought her team might benefit from practicing on the difficult Finkbine greens, and that appeared to be the case.

Crawford said she didn’t feel as though Iowa was intimidated by the greens, but she could hear other players making comments about how fast the short grass played.

Even with that advantage, the Hawkeyes didn’t post another round like their first. The team shot a 313 in the second round, led by sophomore Chelsea Harris’ three over 75, and junior Laura Cilek’s 77.

After the first two rounds of play, the Hawkeyes sat in fourth place, and they hoped to jump into the top three in the final round.

Unfortunately, Iowa couldn’t take advantage and slipped one spot during the third round of play. Cilek led the Hawkeyes with a 4-over 76 as the team posted another score of 313.

“I thought we did a lot of things really well,” Iowa assistant coach John Owens said. “I wish we could have held onto it at the end. We gave a lot away that cost us at least one spot in the field, but overall, it was a pretty good learning experience.”

Crawford wasn’t completely satisfied with the team’s play, either. While the performance was an improvement on previous tournaments, the head coach was expecting to win.

“When you host, you want to win,” she said. “We had a really good opportunity to make a move, finish third, and do some good things. But we let it slip away. It’s disappointing, but there were good things that happened out there as well, and we’ll continue to take steps.”

The fourth-year head coach is hoping the team’s first top-five finish this season helps Iowa unlock the massive potential she said the team is holding in their golf bags.

“Everybody had an opportunity to go low this weekend with their score,” she said. “We had two rounds where all the scores were in the 70s, and we put up our two best scores this tournament. It’s a good turning point, and hopefully some momentum we can build on.”