Tufts men’s golf placed fourth out of 16 teams after one round in the Bowdoin Invitational this past weekend. The Jumbos faced eight NESCAC opponents, giving them a good baseline for what to expect from conference competition in the spring. Trinity’s (294) top four scores placed them in first for the weekend, followed by Husson (297), Middlebury (299) and then Tufts (303) in the fourth spot. Due to bad weather, the second day of the tournament was canceled. So far for its fall season, the squad has golfed in three invitationals, placing seventh of 22, first of four and fifth of 18, respectively. Junior Kemp Bassett said the season has already shown great promise.
“Generally, we feel the tournaments have been going pretty well,” Bassett said. “We’ve been placing pretty high. I think we have a lot of talent, more so than in past years. On one hand, we’re really happy that we’re finishing well in all these tournaments, but we still think we haven’t hit our potential yet.”
Individually at the Bowdoin Invitational, senior Mac Bredahl placed fourth out of 83 golfers, securing an even par for the weekend. Sophomore Jack Meehan shot two over par and tied for ninth. Bassett shot six over with a 78. Finally, senior Adam Schwimmer and senior Travis Clauson both recorded scores of 79 for the day.
“None of us had ever been up there and played at that course,” Bassett said. “It got canceled after one day because of the weather. After the first day, we were in fourth place and I think we were in a really good position to move up the leaderboard. We were all pretty upset that it ended up getting cancelled. We did a really good job of getting there, figuring out the course as we went, and playing through the unknown of that new environment.”
While the team placed high this past week, Clauson said, the team is focusing on minimizing controllable mistakes.
“The team wants to work on eliminating dumb errors,” Clauson said. “I know they plagued us in the first few tournaments. We limited how well we can shoot because of hitting balls in the water or taking unnecessary penalty strokes. I think we’re really going to work on, later in this fall and in the off season, how to eliminate double bogeys or bigger … holes because we’ve been having a disproportionate amount of bad holes.”
Bredahl has competed in nearly every tournament thus far and has posted low, often leading, scores in each. He said the team has one very specific goal in mind.
“The biggest goal right now for our whole team is to win a tournament either this fall or next spring,” Bredahl said.
In the past two weekends, the Jumbos have faced a lot of good NESCAC competition, giving them practice and a preview of what is to come in the spring.
“Conference play in the spring is kind of what we’re all focused on, even in the fall,” Clauson said. “The fall tournaments are fun and we want to play well, but the main goal of the year is to win the league and go to nationals, so we’ve got our eye on Trinity. They appear to be the toughest competitors we’ve got. We’re also a little worried about Middlebury and Hamilton although we’ve beat them in different tournaments this fall. There’s a lot of good competition; the league is a lot better than it was last year. But we’re also better; we’ve been posting better scores.”
The team's last match of the fall season is Jumbo Golf Day on Oct. 2 at Sandy Burr Country Club.
