If Cy Williams were a professor and not a head coach, the UC Davis men’s golfers may want to come see him in office hours.
They didn’t grade out so well in their most recent performance.
The 25th-ranked Aggies had their lowest finish of the year on Tuesday at the Huskies Invitational, shooting a 35-over 899 to place ninth out of 11 teams. The team was plagued by its short game, tallying 32 three-puts at the two-day competition in Bremerton, Wash.
“That many three-putts, it’s like getting a D on a midterm, if you want to do a school analogy,” Williams said. “You don’t want to get too many Ds on a report card, because if you get too many of those at the end of the quarter, you’re going to have a bad grade.”
The three-putts played a large role in the team’s slow start to the tournament. After the first two rounds on Monday, UC Davis was in last place with a 31-over 606, 41 strokes behind Washington, the tournament host and winner.
The Aggies faired better on Tuesday with a 5-over 293, the fourth-best score of all teams on the day. Still, after taking first at the Kansas Invitation and second at the Wolverine Invitational, they were too far back to avoid their worst tournament placing of the year.
“We definitely put ourselves in position to have a much better finish than we did,” Williams said. “We probably hit as many greens and fairways as the team that won. … If we cut a third of those three-putts, we erase some of those big numbers we put on some of those holes, and we finish in the top four or five. We just need to fix that.”
UC Davis will have only one week to fix its short game before its next tournament, the Fighting Irish Gridiron Golf Classic on Oct. 6 in South Bend, Ind.
“We’ll be ready,” Williams said. “We have guys who really care how they do and how this team does, and they’ll take care of it.”
MICHAEL GEHLKEN can be reached at sports@californiaaggie.com.
