Men's Golf Brings Up Rear at Bethpage

After this weekend’s McLaughlin Invitational in Farmingdale, N.Y., the Harvard men’s golf team is back in rebuilding mode after finishing in last place in the 18-team field.

After Saturday morning’s closing round, the Crimson’s combined three-round score of 902 put the team four shots behind 17th-place St. Thomas Aquinas and 72 shots behind the winner, University of West Florida, which shot a team score of 10-under.

Harvard occupied the rear of the field from the very beginning of the tournament by shooting an opening-round 301 on Friday morning, good only for 12th place.

Needing a surge on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning to catch first-round leader St. John’s, which shot 278, Crimson carded team rounds of 296 on Friday and a team-worst 305 on Saturday.

“Golf is a fickle game,” sophomore Greg Shuman said. “At any given time, you can play well. And this weekend, we happened to play very badly.”

No Harvard player finished in the top 20. Shuman’s three rounds of 75, 70, and 72 gave him the team’s highest individual finish—a four-way tie for 33rd. Sophomore Peter Singh finished tied for 64th with a performance of 15 over par.

The McLaughlin took place on the Bethpage State Park Red Course, which plays a length of 6,695 yards.

Still, the Red is overshadowed by its more famous neighbor, Bethpage Black, so difficult that most amateurs have reason to brag simply for breaking 100.

In contrast to the Black, the Red course has relatively flat greens, which run fast enough to give players the challenge of stopping the ball close to the hole.

“The nice thing is that you can make a lot of birdies out there, but it was pretty long,” sophomore Danny Mayer said. “If you hit it in the wrong spots, you’d be hitting long irons into the green.”

Mayer finished tied for 87th with a final score of 22-over, while sophomore Nick Moseley and captain Michael Shore finished tied for 89th and tied for 91st, respectively.

A 62-over performance over three rounds certainly seemed to indicate that the Crimson buried itself under an avalanche of strokes.

However, even if every player is only a few strokes off of his game, those missteps can add up across five players and three rounds. Even a weakness in one area of a player’s game can hurt his round just enough contribute to a poor team score.

“All it takes each round is a couple of missed four-foot putts, and instead of a top-20 finish, you’re looking at a 50th-place finish,” Mayer said. “When you start missing putts and hitting errant shots, that can build upon itself and compound into more mistakes. Instead of 72, you’re looking at 78.”

But the razor-thin margin of error that any golf team must cope with in tournaments also means that Harvard is closer to its best rounds than this week’s numbers suggest.

“If everybody just improves one or two or three strokes per round, we’re definitely right there with some of the top teams,” Shuman said.

In the aftermath of the McLaughlin, the Crimson players know the flaws in their swings but still point to the need to recover confidence, so crucial an element in a game that preys upon anyone whose mental approach is not in order, as the biggest key.

“Playing well is the No. 1 determinant of confidence,” Mayer said. “The nice thing is that we have two weeks until the next tournament to work on practicing and playing well.”

In two weeks, Harvard will try to recover from this disappointing finish by competing in Yale University’s MacDonald Cup.

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