For the No. 6 UCLA men’s golf team, this weekend presents an opportunity to rub elbows with PGA Tour professionals, a title that many of the UCLA players hope to achieve at some point in their golfing careers.
Seizing that opportunity, however, will be a tall order. The individual champion of the U.S. Intercollegiate Golf Tournament will be awarded an automatic exemption to the Reno-Tahoe Open, a PGA tournament held in July.
“It’s very unique to have that in college so I think our guys will absolutely pay attention to that because that’s very cool to get the opportunity to know that if they win this event, they’re automatically in a PGA Tour event,” coach Derek Freeman said.
Sophomore Alex Shi Yup Kim said that he is not going to get caught up in thinking about the PGA event.
“It’s pretty awesome but I’m just going to go out there and play my game,” Kim said. “I think all of us are playing really well right now and I think we should just go out there and let the game take care of itself. We can’t be thinking about getting an exemption.”
The U.S. Intercollegiate begins Sunday at the Stanford University Golf Course and features a stellar field of teams, something the Bruins are very familiar with. In addition to the Bruins, four of the top 10 teams will be in attendance.
After competing against every Pac-10 team during their second”“place finish at last week’s Thunderbird Invitational, this week’s tournament features more of the same for the Bruins. Nine Pac-10 schools will be competing in Palo Alto. Freshman Mario Clemens said that this tournament will help him and his teammates prepare for the all-important Pac-10 Championships, coming up later this month.
“I think it helps,” Clemens said. “We’re going to see how they’re playing and what we need to do to be able to beat them. We pretty much know what the Pac-10 Championships are going to be like so we’re just getting ready for that.”
The Bruins have opted to keep the same lineup that secured them a second place finish last weekend.
That lineup consists of sophomores Kim and Gregor Main as well as freshmen Clemens, Pontus Widegren and Pedro Figueiredo. The fifth spot, which has been in constant question, appears to have been granted to Clemens, at least for now. His team-best 11th place finish last weekend seems to have solidified his position in the lineup.
“One of the unique things about our team is they’re all very good and so we can interchange guys and there’s really not much of a change,” Freeman said. “We felt good about how the team played at ASU so we felt like we need to keep with the same team especially since Mario played well and we wanted to keep him in the lineup.”
Washington ran away with last year’s event by shooting 36 under par. Kim said that the weather was nice last year which is why some of the scores were so low.
“You never know but last year, the weather was perfect. If it’s like that again this year, we’ll probably have to go low,” Kim said.
“It all depends on how the weather is and how the condition of the golf course is so we won’t really know until we get to the golf course.”