BY ZAK PYZIK
For The Daily
Published October 5, 2009
A repeat of Sunday’s performance would have been ideal for the No. 19 Michigan men’s golf team. Instead, the Wolverines saw themselves slip from first place in round one to a fifth-place finish at the Windon Memorial Classic in Glencoe, Ill.
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Michigan exchanged the lead with Illinois through round one and two of the two-day competition. But in yesterday’s final round, the Wolverines tallied 303 points; good for an unfortunate 13th-place finish in round two.
Michigan struggled to birdie towards the end of the competition. The Wolverines had six holes of double bogeys or worse.
“Today, we just didn’t play well,” Michigan coach Andrew Sapp said. “We had one of the worse scores of the whole day compared to the other teams. We were missing greens, hitting it in trees and the weather was perfect. We can’t blame it on anything but ourselves.”
Sophomore Matt Thompson led Michigan, finishing 20th overall in the tournament. He shot four over par and accumulated 75 points in round three.
Thompson entered the event ranked No. 8, and certainly lived up to expectations in round one by finishing only one over par. He ended his streak of seven consecutive rounds of par or better after notching 75 points in the second and third rounds.
“I had two double bogeys,” Thompson said. “If you take them away, we’re sitting much better.”
The trio of Thompson, junior Lion Kim and freshman Jack Schultz finished one- two- three again, and golfed 12 of 18 rounds at par or better.
“We needed to play like we played Sunday, but we weren’t able to do that,” Kim said. “We made a lot of mistakes. I made a couple double bogeys today. We had to stay away from big numbers, and we just didn’t do that.”
The Wolverines will have to regroup as they prepare to battle at the Brickyard Collegiate tournament in Macon, Ga., this upcoming weekend.
“As a team, we are on the right track— it’s a matter of all five guys playing well at the same time,” Kim said. “Our team this year has the most potential out of every other team and it’s just a matter of us clicking.”
