Men's Golf Struggles in Tune-Up Tourney

At this weekend’s New England Division I Championships, horrendous rain and high winds forced cancellation of Sunday’s final round, leaving the Harvard men’s golf team without a chance to rebound from a disappointing first day that saw the Crimson finish 10th.

In a field in which only two players broke par, the Brown Bears’ Larry Haertel captured the individual title with a 71 after winning a tiebreaker against Army’s Pat Beverly.

Harvard’s team score of 310 left the Crimson trailing leader and eventual winner Sacred Heart by 14 strokes, as Harvard finished a combined 22 strokes over par.

Brown placed ninth, beating the Crimson by just two strokes.

“We really should have done a lot better, but we left a lot of strokes out there,” freshman Danny Mayer said. “Our ball-striking was pretty good, but our putting definitely could have been better.”

After a seventh-place showing at Yale the weekend before, Mayer continued to find his name gracing the top ranks of the leaderboard.

The freshman stood in third place at the end of the round after making four birdies and shooting an even-par 72.

Though the course presented few challenges, its undulating greens often forced players to work hard to avoid a three-putt.

“When you get a downhill putt, it can get away from you, and the high winds kind of amplified the speed of the greens,” Mayer said.

Despite calm conditions on Day 1, the average score hovered at 79.53, somewhat high given the relative ease of the course compared to other courses on the circuit.

“The course played quite difficult,” said sophomore Mike Shore, who shot 84.

“I played the course last year as a freshman, and I remember it being a fairly straightforward course,” he added. “This year, the scores seemed way higher.”

Since each golfer competes as an individual, finding areas for improvement as a team remains difficult, because each player finds himself practicing to improve different skills.

Harvard’s freshmen hovered around the Day 1 average score. Nick Moseley fired a 77 to finish in 27th place. Greg Shuman and Peter Singh shot 79 and 82, respectively.

The Crimson’s biggest tournament lies ahead, as Harvard travels to Hamburg, N.J., next weekend for the Ivy League Championships.

—Staff writer Robert T. Hamlin can be reached at rhamlin@fas.harvard.edu.