They gathered for one final time on a golf course, just short of the 18th green at Prairie Dunes Country Club, to share hugs and give thanks to one another for the season.
It was perhaps fitting — Georgia Tech’s golf team again finished just shy of its intended destination. In match play, the Yellow Jackets lost Tuesday morning in the quarterfinals of the NCAA championships, dropping four of five matches to Oklahoma State.
“It’s just weird,” senior Richard Werenski said, his voice catching. “It’s all over.”
Tech is beyond a doubt one of the top teams in the country; the Jackets earned their 17th top-eight NCAA finish — four in the past five years — but will go into next season still pursuing their first championship.
“We definitely had a really good chance, I feel like,” Werenski said. “I don’t think any of us played our best golf today. Just upset. That’s probably the emotion I feel right now. But nothing you can do.”
Tech advanced to match play, where each team’s five players square off in one-on-one matchups, after finishing in the top eight out of the 30-team field after 54 holes. Ranked No. 4 in the country by Golfstat, the Jackets quickly fell behind the second-ranked Cowboys and never recovered.
Starting on the par-3 10th hole, Bo Andrews burned the edge of the cup with a 3-foot par putt, losing a chance to win the first hole. Right after Andrews, Anders Albertson put his tee shot in the sand and bogeyed, giving the hole to Wyndham Clark and his par. Ollie Schniederjans and Seth Reeves, Tech’s two best players, also couldn’t land their tee shots on the green while their counterparts did, allowing Ian Davis and Jordan Niebrugge, respectively, to take one-hole leads.
“(Oklahoma State) hit some really nice shots on 10, and I just felt like we were chasing ’em all day,” coach Bruce Heppler said.
At one point early on, the Jackets were behind in all five matches before the first group had reached the seventh hole. The first three players in the Tech lineup, Werenski, Andrews and Albertson, never led in their matches. Tech continued to fight, forcing the Cowboys to win two of their points on the final hole and their other two on the 17th. However, of the 88 holes played by all five players, Tech led for just two of them, when Schniederjans briefly grabbed control of his match before it ended all square.
“It’s hard when you’re trying to push to turn things around, you can’t try to push things around,” Schniederjans said. “You still have to be very patient. Golf’s the hardest sport for that.”
In the four years that Tech has made the quarterfinals since the NCAA instituted match play in 2009, the Jackets have lost three times.
“I don’t think our match-play style or philosophy had anything to do with losing,” Heppler said. “They just made more putts.”
Heppler called the season probably one of the three best in his 19-year tenure. The team won six of its 12 stroke-play tournaments, including its seventh ACC title in nine years and its fifth regional title. Schniederjans won or shared a school-record five individual titles, was the NCAA individual runner-up and was named a first-team All-American on Tuesday. The team maintained its perfect academic progress rate score. Heppler said three or four team members will be named academic All-Americans.
Heppler’s affection for the group is obvious. As he, assistant coach Brennan Webb and their players hugged it out at the end of the round, Heppler thanked them for their hard work, a sentiment they directed back to him.
“We did everything we could the whole year,” Werenski said. “We worked hard. Nobody on the team doesn’t work hard enough. It just wasn’t our time.”
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