Men's Golf Finishes 3rd Overall at CL Tourney
LACONIA, Ind. -- The Men's Golf team competed in the final event of the season on Monday and Tuesday. Heading into the Crossroads League Conference Championship they were ranked 7th out of 9 teams. We didn't feel we truly should have been the 7th seed, but we have played pretty bad all year dating back to the fall season. It wasn't until the last month of the season when we finally started to hit our groove.
This spring we had some terrible finishes 8th/9, 17th/17 and 6th/6. After our rocky start to the Spring we had a meeting and really dialed in where we need to practice leading up to Conference. The boys put in hard work the past 4 weeks in preparation for this tournament. The top two teams have generally been tough to catch but we felt like we could get 4th (where we placed the last 2 seasons) and even 3rd. That was our goal.
Conditions on the 36th hole day one were extremely windy. Probably the most wind we have faced all spring and on a course with not much guard (trees) it was really blowing out there. We played bad in Round 1 and were still in 7th place. Luckily for us, most of the other schools struggled as well so we weren't too far off the top 3rd of the leaderboard. In Round 2 we played much better as did the other top schools in the Conference, kind of separating the two halves. Our goal after the first day is to always improve our position.
We were 1 shot off 4th place (Spring Arbor) and 9 shots off 3rd place (Indiana Wesleyan). We knew a solid round would put is in position to achieve our goal. The boys were looking good in Round 2 and we were confident we could repeat that performance in Round 3.
The second day (Round 3) was very windy, but slightly less than day one. Round 3 is where we gained ground. We had the second lowest score of the day, only getting beat by Marian who went on to win the tournament. With our solid performance in Round 3, we gained ground on both SAU and IWU and finished in 3rd place.
I'm extremely proud of these boys for their efforts the last month of the season. We had a goal in mind and a plan in place to achieve that goal. Our 3rd place finish is the best finish for the cougars in the last 20+ years. Only two other times USF finished 3rd in conference (mid-late 2010's). The only team to do better was the 1980 team who won Conference and earned their bid to Nationals. To be on top of the Conference you need to be near that top 3rd year in and year out. The past two seasons we were 4th, and this year 3rd. We are hoping this sets the stage for us to make a nice run in the years to come. The fellas were very happy with the finish!
Individually, we had 2 Cougars in the top 10!
Levi Follett finished in a Tie for 7th and Bailey Marquart finished in a Tie for 9th.
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-Head Coach Corey Potts-