Men’s golf striving for consistency

With the men’s golf fall season wrapped up, the team will now take this winter to improve and build on what was a season of highs and lows.

“We struggled to be consistent this year,” Coach Chris Curran said, “but we will work on it.”

The Purple and Red Invitational in Layton this season was a perfect example of what Curran said. In the second round of the tournament, the team was on fire. They collectively shot their best round of the year, a 287.

“This showed potential of what we had,” Curran said. “It proved that we could compete to not only our competitors, but to ourselves as well.”

The next day, however, the team shot its highest round of the year, a 307.

“We had a solid group of guys every tournament, said junior golfer Nick Tarasiewicz. “The scores didn’t show, but we got better as the year went on.”

Andrew Carlin, also a junior, agrees that this year was a year for improvement.

“No one played to their potential,” Carlin said. “But we all definitely improved.”

Curran speculates that the mental aspect of the game is what hurt them this season and that one of the most important ways they can expect to get better is to control their emotions.

“Golf is different than most other sports, whereas maybe you can get away with playing a bad second quarter and coming back to win,” Curran said. “You have to play all 18 holes at the top of your game.”

The thing that is common in all sports, however, is practice. It’s the most important part to becoming better, which is why the team is going to do all they can this winter off-season to help improve the individual aspect, as well as the collective part of the game.

This offseason is the first year that they have hired a strength and conditioning coach for the players to help strengthen their core, flexibility and endurance.

“People think we get to ride around in golf carts and drink our Gatorade and then go hit a ball,” Curran said. “But on a 36-hole day, we can walk up to 8 to 10 miles in the dead heat while carrying our golf bags. It can be mentally and physically draining.”

Not only will the players be doing core and strength training during their off-season, they are encouraged to individually play in tournaments in the winter to work on their weaknesses as well as their strengths.

Even though the result of the season is not what they hoped for, they were able to make it enjoyable regardless.

“This season was a lot of fun,” Tarasiewicz said. “We just need to have the same motivation in the off-season as we did in the fall.”

We can expect that the players will work hard this off-season to be ready to pick back up in the second half of their two-part season in February.