Bruins fall short at season’s end

By Pauline Vu
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

The men’s golf team has said one thing all year long: that
if they could just play to their potential, they’d be a team
to reckon with.

They said this with nagging insistence when they played so
poorly they were ashamed, and they said it with pride when they
played so well they proved their mantra right.

Ultimately, their performance showed those weren’t just
empty words. As the year ended everything came together for the
team, and the players rode that momentum all the way to the NCAA
Championships.

“We’re just trying to be the Cinderella
story,” sophomore Travis Johnson said just before the NCAA
Tournament.

The team started off as you’d expect it to in the fall
with two true freshmen on the roster. Then, the Bruins were
mediocre, with a sixth-place finish at the Carpet Capital
tournament in Georgia as the highlight and the final fall
tournament, the Prestige, as the low point. There the Bruins placed
11th.

“UCI, Santa Barbara beat us,” said freshman John
Merrick, recalling the team’s silence after the tournament.
“We were kinda down.”

Then came the winter break, and after that, the spring season
started. This was the worst stretch of the year for the team. Out
of a string of five tournaments, they had one acceptable finish
““ fifth at the Oregon Duck Invitational ““ and four bad
finishes ““ 14th at PING Intercollegiate, 11th at the
TaylorMade Classic, 13th at Southwestern Intercollegiates, and 13th
at the Savane Invitational.

Though they tried to keep their spirits up, the men were
disheartened at times. They doubted themselves and whether they
could actually make it to West Regionals, which took only the top
12 teams in the district ““ they were always on the bubble at
around No. 13 or 14 ““ and from there, play well enough to
make it to the NCAA Championship Tournament.

Through it all, the Bruins said that if only they’d
“play to the best of our ability,” they could do it.
But the words were sounding more and more hollow.

Though the starting four of junior Parker McLachlin, Johnson,
freshman Steve Conway and Merrick were constant, the fifth man kept
changing. Sometimes it was freshman Roy Moon, sometimes sophomore
J.T. Kohut.

It came to a head April 21, just before the U.S.
Intercollegiates invitational at Stanford. Before the invitational,
Sherfy told his team, “Guys, you’re young but
you’re not that young anymore…now it’s time, and if
you don’t get it done now you’re just gonna be sitting
at home.”

The speech worked. The team finished third, assuring them a spot
in the West Regionals.

“We wanted to show these people that we weren’t
chumps,” McLachlin said then.

Kohut also placed 11th as an individual, assuring him the fifth
spot on the team for the rest of the year.

Finally, the Bruins were playing up to that infamous potential
they’d been talking about all year long.

The next week saw a solid fifth-place finish at Pac-10
Championships and then a two-week break before West Regionals.
There, the Bruins needed to finish in the top 10 to earn a spot at
NCAA Championships.

And there, the Bruins had their greatest triumph of the
year.

At the challenging course, where the rough ““ the grass
surrounding the fairways ““ was higher than any they’d
ever played on before, the team played smartly and beat several
higher-ranked teams, including Pac-10 champion USC. They finished
fifth, clinching an NCAA spot.

Merrick in particular contributed that weekend. He led the field
after the first day and eventually ended up placing sixth
overall.

Thus, UCLA had confidence going into NCAAs, but the team fell
short. In the 30-team field the Bruins needed to be in the top half
after the first two days of the four-day tournament. They were 22nd
after the first day and battled back the second day, though they
still came up short by just one stroke.

The Bruins finished 17th overall with a score of 591. Three
teams tied for 14th place at 590.

“We were disappointed,” Merrick said. “We knew
what we had to do and on the second day we were right there, but it
just didn’t pan out for it.”

Only one Bruin continued as an individual. McLachlin finished
16th overall.

They were disappointed with their finish at NCAA Championships.
After all, they didn’t come just to play and they
didn’t come to be happy to be there ““ they came to win.
And they didn’t even make it past the first two days.

But despite that, they know this much: compared to the bleak,
questioning days of the early spring season, it was an achievement
that they even made it that far.

And the experience the team gained this year bodes well for next
year.

“I’m very happy for our young guys to get
experience,” Kohut said of Merrick and Conway, the true
freshmen. “And everybody comes back next year.”

Looks like some guys played to their potential after all.