For 4 1/2 days, the NCAA golf championship was a joyride for Georgia, as the Bulldogs reveled in busting the low expectations for themselves at the Concession Golf Club and proving themselves the equal to the best teams in the country.
Avoiding costly mistakes and utilizing their depth, they survived the cut to 15 teams, and then eight, earning the No. 3 seed in match play. On Tuesday morning, they blasted No. 6-seed South Florida 4-1 in their match-play quarterfinal. However, first under heavy rain and then overcast skies, the run came to an end Tuesday afternoon with a 3-1-1 loss to No. 7-seed LSU in a semifinal.
“These guys will always be pretty special for the run they made,” Georgia coach Chris Haack said.
Ranked No. 33 by Golfstat, Georgia was the lowest-ranked team, by one spot, to make the 15-team cut. They were the lowest by 16 spots to make the eight-team cut and the lowest by 20 in the semifinals.
Against LSU, which will face USC in Wednesday’s finals, the match came down to junior Sepp Straka and freshman Zach Healy, both playing their first NCAA tournament. With Georgia down 2-1, Straka went to an extra hole with Brandon Pierce after dropping a two-hole lead with two to play. Healy was down one hole to Benjamin Taylor, needing to win the 18th hole to extend his match.
Healy, from Norcross, had hung in gamely, making clutch putts to halve holes and stay in the match. On the 15th hole, a par-4 where ultimately he gave Taylor the one-hole lead that proved the winning margin, Healy played a shot out of ankle-deep water, splashing the ball about 30 yards into the fairway.
“You’ve just got to swing as hard as you can, almost semi-like a bunker shot, swinging 20 times harder,” he said. “I was just contemplating whether or not to take my shirt off.”
But, after Taylor stuck his iron on the par-4 18th to inside four feet, Healy had to hole out a chip from a downhill lie from about 100 feet to have a chance at winning the hole. His shot ran well past the cup and Healy conceded, rendering Straka’s match moot and ending the semifinal and Georgia’s season.
“That’s what you practice and what you hope for, to be in that situation,” Healy said. “Obviously, it wasn’t the outcome I wanted, but it was a fun week, a great week. Coming in, we had our sights set on, obviously, getting through stroke play, but we definitely wanted to win it all. We almost got there.”
The season is a difficult one to categorize. The Bulldogs won three tournaments and were runners-up in three more, but also finished last or near last in three others. They had only one All-SEC player, junior Lee McCoy, but collected the second most pars among the 30 teams at Concession, a severe layout where par can be an achievement, and made it to the national semifinals.
“We knew we could play with (the best teams in the country), but then we’d go someplace and we wouldn’t play very well, and I can’t explain it,” Haack said between the quarterfinals and semifinals matches. “I’d always say to them, ‘What … is going on?’”
On Tuesday, as dusk fell upon the course, Haack finally had his answer.
He said his memory of these Bulldogs will be “that they gave us a chance to win the national championship. They stepped up when it was time to step up and they … nearly got us there.”
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