The Winthrop men’s golf team tied for seventh out of ten teams last week at the Any Given Tuesday Intercollegiate. The team traveled to Kiawah Island, SC for the three day event that began on Jan. 24 and ended on Jan. 26.
Winthrop’s best performer was Ryan Tattan, who finished with an even par after three rounds. Head Coach Kevin Pendley said it wasn’t a surprise to see Tattan lead the team.
“He’s been our best guy for pretty much the last two years,” Pendley said. “He’s been rock solid. He was good in the fall; he played well in the amateur events he got to play in. He had a pretty good summer when he did get to play back home in England. [He] made match play at the English Amateur, which is a very prestigious event.”
While the golf team usually doesn’t compete until later in the spring, Pendley said this event and one more were added to the spring schedule to make up for time lost last semester.
“When the fall season was canceled, a lot of teams were scrambling to pick up some extra events which I felt was important for the student-athletes,” he said. “[I] did not want them to feel the impact of basically having two seasons essentially be half-killed.”
Winthrop took six golfers to last week’s match, which Pendley said is one more than the team usually competes with.This gave an extra golfer the chance to get some meaningful reps in, while the team’s total was still calculated using only the best four scores from each round.
While Pendley said he thought the team “did some good things” given that there had only been about two weeks to prepare since students arrived back on campus, he cited “competitive rust” as a cause for mental mistakes and players not responding as well to adversity as he would have liked.
After the final round, Winthrop’s team score was 12 over par.
“We didn’t score well on the par-5s which was the big key to that golf course,” Pendley said. ”Any week you look at par-5 scoring — the teams that are at the top of the leaderboard in par-5 scoring, I can almost guarantee you they’re at the top of the leaderboard for the tournament as well.”
While the team’s top goal is to play in the postseason, Pendley said he doesn’t want his guys to focus on that very much.
“There’s a lot of factors that go into postseason play that are out of our control, so I want to just see us focus on us and grow, and not worry about the exterior stuff,” he said.
“There’s been times in the last couple of years [where] we’ve gotten a little off track and focused too much on rankings and all the other stuff. The only bearing we can have on that is handling our day-to-day business and making sure we’re improving every day.”
The team has almost an entire month off before its next event, the Wexford Intercollegiate. Winthrop will travel to Hilton Head Island to compete on Feb. 22 and 23.
