Rookie Coach Brings Change

He isn’t your average golf coach.

In the case of new hire Jim Burke, the third man to helm the Harvard men’s golf team in as many seasons, that is most likely a good thing.

“In the past, we’d just go play and that would be practice,” captain D.J. Hynes says. “He’s brought a lot of structure that we haven’t had.”

He isn’t your average golf coach. After 30 years of underperformance—that’s how many seasons have passed since the Crimson last won the Ivy League golf title in 1975—things ought to change.

“Sometimes guys peak freshman year,” junior Tom Hegge says, “and get worse. Priorities change or whatever. When the coach shows up [and] motivates you to show improvement, that gets the whole team motivated.”

Just two months after bottoming out at Ballyowen Golf Club and finishing last in the Ivies for the first time since 1982, Harvard hired a different kind of golf coach this July. Years before he earned all-conference coaching honors at MIT in 2002-03 and long before he transformed himself into a professional golfer, Burke played a different game.

“I was a hockey player,” he says.

A four-year letterman for the University of Maine, Burke played a brief minor league stint in the Hartford Whalers organization.

That experience, players say, has come in handy.

“There are more drills, he’s a little more hands on,” Hynes says. “He’ll set up lessons. He’s a great organizational leader.”

The link between hockey and golf, most recently exploited by the slap-shotting, long-driving antics of “Happy Gilmore,” remains hazy.

“It’s tough to make real-life comparisons to ‘Happy Gilmore’,” Hynes says.

And yet Burke manages to represent that crossover appeal.

“A golf coach is a different kind of animal,” Hegge says. “It’s not a team sport. A hockey coach will get in your face if you’re not playing offense, defense. [Burke] has kind of brought some of the fire from hockey.”

For Burke, “every sport and team sport is the same.”

“I would base most of my coaching,” Burke says, “on a consistent approach to the game day in and day out.”

That approach was tough to take last week, when the team withdrew from its season-opening tournament at Dartmouth. Hynes aggravated his knee, which underwent ACL surgery last December—he will return this weekend—and sophomore Sam Lissner withdrew because of sickness, dropping the team below the four-player minimum.

Consider the lesson learned: freak injuries occur in any sport.

“[Coach Burke] has taken it in stride,” Hegge says.

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