With a look of sadness on her face, Arizona's Maria Baena walked over to the scorer's table after completing yesterday's final round, thinking she had cost herself the Pacific 10 Conference women's golf title with a double bogey on the 18th hole. But when she arrived, she discovered she had indeed edged Jody Niemann of Arizona State and Jeong-Min Park of UCLA to win the individual title at the conference championship, which concluded yesterday at the Raven Golf Club in Tucson.

With the double bogey, Baena, a freshman who has won four tournaments in her first year at UA, won the individual title after shooting a final round 74, and finishing with a 2-under-par 214 at the par 72, 6,002-yard course. Niemann and Park finished one shot back.

"I'm really excited that I'm playing well," Baena said. "On the last shot, I was really nervous because it was a hard shot. I screwed the shot up, but I won, so it doesn't matter now."

Baena was in seventh place after round one Monday, but moved into first place Tuesday and never gave that position up.

Currently ranked No. 5 individually in the nation, Baena adds the Pac-10 title to wins at the Dick McGuire Invitational, the Betsy Rawls Longhorn Classic, and the LSU Fairwood Invitational.

Baena's face lit up after finding out she was the winner, but was still saddened by the fact that Arizona's hopes of winning their first Pac-10 title since 1992 had been shattered.

"It is nice to win the (individual) title," Baena said. "But we really wanted to win as a team."

While the Wildcats, who entered the final round of play with an 11-shot lead, had fallen to third place, ASU battled back from third place to capture their fourth straight Pac-10 title.

The No. 3 Sun Devils shot a 1-under-par 287 yesterday for a three-day total of 875. UCLA came in one shot behind at 876, while Arizona, who finished with 305, tied with Stanford for third place at 879. Washington shot a final round 308 for 991, which was good for fifth place.

Wildcat freshman Krissy Register (216) and sophomore Heather Graff (220), who finished fourth and eighth, respectively, gave good efforts, with Graff being selected as a second-team All-Pac-10 player (Baena was named to the first team). But it was the play of the team as a whole that weighed down Arizona's effort down the stretch.

Freshman Christina Tolerton finished in 21st place (229) after rounds of 76-73-80, and senior Jeanne Anne Krizman stumbled home with an 85 to place 46th at 246.

"We did not play as well as we did the first two days of the tournament," UA head coach Rick LaRose said. "But we did finish third, which is better than we did last year (UA finished fourth). I'm proud of the girls, although we are disappointed on how things turned out. Hopefully, we'll do a lot better next year."

"We got off to a slow start today, while UCLA and ASU got off to a great start," UA assistant coach Tom Brill said. "We needed to shoot a 300 or below to win. You can't have two or three players out there, you need all five to be there for 18 holes."

Rounding out the rest of the team field was Oregon (912) in sixth place, followed by Southern Cal (917), Oregon State (957), Washington State (966), and Cal (993), who finished its inaugural season in 10th place.

"We are so young," Baena said. "With two freshmen, two sophomores and one senior, we definitely have a good team right now."