Men’s Golf Takes 12th Behind Liu’s Effort

The Harvard men’s golf team traveled to Plymouth Meeting, Pa., last weekend for its penultimate tournament of the fall.

The Crimson was part of a 21-team field that came together for the Big 5 Invitational. Harvard tied with Dartmouth for 12th place in the event, finishing behind Yale, Princeton, and Penn, but topping Brown and Cornell.

“We came into the tournament very optimistic,” freshman Seiji Liu said. “It was the best field by far that we’ve faced...[We] struggled a bit. I can’t really explain why. I don’t know. Golf is just one of those things where anything can happen.”

The Big 5 Invitational, hosted by the Philadelphia Big 5—Penn, LaSalle, St. Joseph’s, Temple, and Villanova—took place at the par-70 Plymouth Country Club. Designed in 1912 by William S. Flynn, the course proved difficult for most of the Crimson golfers.

“Plymouth Country Club was an extremely difficult golf course,” Liu said. “They cut two of the par fives into par fours, so they were extremely long. And it [had] a narrow tree line where any off-line shot would be penalized badly. And then the greens were tiny, slopey, fast, and hard.”

The one golfer who seemingly had no trouble was Liu. The freshman started off slowly with two double-bogeys and a bogey in his first five holes on Saturday, but he recovered to shoot a +2 for the opening round. Liu followed up that performance with a -1 on Sunday. On the back nine of his final round, he carded a 33.

“It started after the sixth hole of the first round,” Liu said of his rally on Saturday. “I saw that [one of my teammates] had played poorly on one or two of the holes that I messed up on as well...I realized that I really needed to start something and get it going to contribute to my team...That made all the difference.”

The freshman finished the tournament tied for third place with Binghamton’s Jake Katz, trailing only Kentucky’s Joseph Barr (E) and Furman’s Matthew Broome (-7).

Liu’s result signaled a nice recovery from his play at the MacDonald Cup last weekend, where he shot a +15.

“As always with freshmen, it’s getting used to the college atmosphere, and I’d definitely say Seiji is a little more comfortable now, and that definitely helped him play better this week,” junior captain Tony Grillo said.

The rest of the Harvard golf team did not fare nearly as well as Liu. Grillo and freshman Theo Lederhausen showed consistency, each shooting a 76 and a 74, but their +10 was only good enough to tie for 42nd place out of the 111 competitors. Junior Mark Pollak and Connor Wentzell shot a +17 and +18, respectively.

“We’re a little disappointed,” Grillo said. “We feel that this whole season, especially with this last tournament, has been very mediocre.”

The Crimson, which took sixth place in the event last year, was bested on the leader board by several of its conference rivals.

The Quakers finished two strokes ahead of Harvard in ninth place, the Bulldogs tied for fifth with 587 strokes, and the Tigers, which had four golfers place in the top 36, tied for third to pace the Ivy League squads.

Yale has now beaten the Crimson in three straight events this year.

“In the back of our minds, [beating the Bulldogs] is one of our goals,” Liu said. “But when we approach tournaments, we’re not really thinking about our opponents. We just want to perform the best we can against the course.”

Furman won the Big 5 Invitational in a dominant fashion. Its final tally of 574 was eight strokes better than St. John’s runner-up score. Kentucky (583) and Binghamton (587), along with Princeton and Yale, rounded out the top five.

With its 12th-place finish this week and its seventh-place finishes in the McLaughlin and the MacDonald Cup earlier this season, Harvard enters the fall’s final event next week—the Northeast Invitational—still looking to crack the top five in a tournament. But Liu is confident that his squad is up to the task.

“We’re looking forward to the final tournament next week,” he said. “We would love to get a win, because all eight Ivy League teams will come together for the first time on a very difficult venue. This will be a nice preview to the Ivy League championship in the spring.”

“We know if we play well we will win,” Grillo said.

—Staff writer Timothy J. Walsh can be reached at twalsh@fas.harvard.edu.