All of us had our lives altered greatly by the COVID-19 pandemic, and most often in a negative way, but for Marcella Mercer there was a silver lining.

Time on the golf course.

“I was able to go play every day,” the senior at Flathead High School said. “It was actually a break for me.”

When the Montana High School Association suspended spring sports and the high schools went into lockdown in March, Mercer was afforded extra time to hone an already excellent golf game. She’d blaze through her remote learning – she’s a 4.0 student – and then head to a local course or a junior event.

As she and her teammates prepare for the Western AA Divisional today and Friday at Fairmont Hot Springs, the field no doubt knows that Mercer has won every high school tournament she’s played in this season.

It wasn’t always this way: She’s made two very noticeable scoring leaps, from her first year of high school to her second, and from last season to this. But she was always good.

“The first day I saw her play on the course, she drove a green on a par-4,” Flathead coach Roy Antley said. “It wasn’t the longest hole (it was No. 2 on Buffalo Hill’s Cameron course), but I was thinking: ‘That’s a pretty amazing shot for a freshman.’

“She was a great player pretty much from the first time she showed up as a freshman. But her consistency and pretty much all aspects of her game have really taken a step up.”

Mercer moved to Kalispell from Billings, after several summers of her family coming to the Flathead Valley. One of those summers – she says she was 11 or 12 – she and her older brother attended a golf camp.

She was hooked, perhaps because she kept beating her sibling.

“He was not a fan of that and I thought it was great,” she said. “He dropped it after that, and I kept going.”

Her scores kept dropping – to where her average sits at 73.3 this season, which should set up nicely for divisionals and the State AA tournament Oct. 1-2 at Larchmont and the Missoula Country Club courses.

Her performances at state reflect the improvement. As a freshman she was eighth in AA while shooting 98-92 for a 190 (Note: A lot of competitors went high that tournament). Then her sophomore year she shot 160 and tied for fifth; last year her 163 tied her for second.

Then came 2020 and a pandemic and a lot of time to work on the game.

“What makes her so prepared is she plays all these junior events,” Antley notes. “She travels across the country and plays in these tournaments – she’s accustomed to playing at the highest level, on course set-ups that are really challenging compared to what she deals with here at Montana tournaments.”

The exposure and competition has drawn plenty of interest in colleges, and Mercer has a handful of Division III schools interested. These are academic-first colleges that don’t issue athletic scholarships, but they do compete. Washington University in St. Louis, for example, is interested; Williams College in Williamsport, Massachusetts; Bowdoin College in Maine.

She recently visited Washington and Lee in Lexington, Virginia, though of course – as COVID-19 has not gone away – she could not enter any buildings.

As the postseason arrives Mercer wonders who else might have made the leap. She saw Eastern AA competition once, at the Great Falls Invitational on Aug. 17. She shot 75 and won by four strokes over Billings Senior’s Kenzie Walsh. It’s notable that Mercer was the only Western AA golfer in the top eight.

Add in the fact that teams golf together rather than risk community spread with mixed foursomes, and this is a different animal.

“The rules are so strange right now,” Antley said. “Kids are really not allowed to warm up. If they start on hole 12 (in a shotgun start), they can go to the green on 11 and chip and putt. But it really is a challenge for these kids not being able to take full swings on the range beforehand.”

As an example of both this difficulty and Mercer’s talent, Antley pointed to last week’s Kalispell Invitational at Buffalo Hill: She began her round six-over after six holes; she finished at even-par, meaning she went 6-under to close things out.

“Truly you have no idea where people are, standing out there,” said Mercer. “In the past you had a sense of where people were (scoring). I don’t know if it’s a blessing in disguise, not knowing what you’re up against. It will be interesting at state.”

This week she worked in a trip to Missoula to play the courses she’ll see at state.

“Obviously the goal is to be state champion,” Mercer said. “But if anything, just put down two solid rounds like I have been. How I’ve been handling courses has been getting better and better.

“My short game was probably the weakest part of my game and I worked on that a lot this spring. And I have seen the results. I’m looking forward to continuing the trend and seeing how low I can go.”