SEASON RECAP: Men's Golf

For two straight days, weather delayed play at the Ivy League Championships, which were held April 16-17 at Ballyowen Golf Club in Hamburg, N.J. The frosty conditions underscored what amounted to a gloomy season for the Harvard men’s golf team, which finished last at the tournament and did not win during a dismal spring.

Still, if the team’s overall springtime performance dropped with the unusually cold temperatures, so did senior Chris Wu improve with time.

His eighth-place finish at the Ivy League Championships helped charge a Sunday Harvard attack in which the Crimson shot a 298—one of its best combined scores of the year. Earlier in the season, Wu scored the best finish on both sides of Harvard’s 314-330 loss to Claremont-Mudd-Scripps. He also finished eighth at the Yale Spring Opener on April 10.

“I hit the ball well,” Wu said after the Opener. “I didn’t score well putting-wise, but I’m happy about the way I’m playing.”

Wu’s strong showing came just short of earning a second straight year on the All-Ivy team, which was dominated by Princeton and Columbia.

The Crimson also fell short of its goals.

“We were surprised that we didn’t gain much ground on the field,” said Wu after the Spring Opener—but that might well have been the theme of the year.

The team’s 298 at the championships—which was buoyed by a strong round from D.J. Hynes, who shot a 73 during the Sunday round, and a strong team-second-place overall finish by senior Matt Amis—was surpassed, surprisingly enough, by sub-300 scores from every Ivy League team.

In the New England Championships, which were held the following week, the team finished a disappointing 10th.

“I think we were hoping to do a little bit better,” Hynes said, “but it was a good chance for some players to get experience with the competition.”

“Conditions-wise it was pretty rough,” he added of a weekend cursed by storms and frigid temperatures. “It was a learning experience for some of the younger players.”

One of those players, freshman Sam Lissner, emerged as a promising member of the squad and a worthy No. 2 to Hynes for next year. His 34th-place finish at the URI Spring Invitational was the third best score on the team.

Wu graduates with the Class of 2005, which means Hynes will have to fill the void left by Harvard’s best player next season.

With a fifth-place finish at URI—the best by an Ivy League golfer—Hynes charged into the offseason on top of his game and will lead the team next fall.

FALL

The Crimson fared much better in the fall of 2004, playing its strongest golf at the end. Harvard’s second-place finish at the Toski Invitational in Amherst, Mass., on Oct. 25 was its best showing of the 2004-05 calendar year.

Wu, who won the tournament in 2003 with an individual medal, finished second in 2004.

“This course sets up well for my game, and so I was able to capitalize on good putting and pretty good ball-striking,” he said after that tournament.

Hynes played a consistent fall and freshmen Lissner and Andrew Livingston also finished strong.

In the end, it was a rebuilding year for a Harvard team that will rely plenty on its newly experienced youngsters next season.

—Staff writer Alex McPhillips can be reached at rmcphill@fas.harvard.edu.