Men’s golf makes most of narrow NCAA tournament berth

Maybe it has something to do with John Wooden’s inescapable aphorisms immortalized all over the walls of the Wooden Center and the winning culture that he brought as a scientific formula to Westwood.

Maybe it has to do with the sudden emergence of UCLA as a football powerhouse.

Or maybe it has to do with Derek Freeman’s seven-year tenure as the UCLA men’s golf coach, who over that period has guided the Bruins to its second NCAA championship title and mentored UCLA’s only individual national champion.

But whatever the cause, UCLA’s sports culture demands excellence – golf is no exception.

That’s why, even after making the quarterfinals of the NCAA men’s golf championship at Prairie Dunes Country Club in Hutchinson, Kan., a spot no one expected UCLA to be in, losing to a strong LSU side felt like a disappointment.

“We fought as hard as we could, but just couldn’t get it done,” said sophomore Jonathan Garrick. “It was still tough to lose after what we had accomplished during the tournament. After making it to the quarterfinals, it’s hard to lose when you’re that close (to the finals).”

However, even with the loss, the Bruins’ strong championship tournament finish marks a high point in an otherwise “subpar” season by UCLA golf standards.

“I guess you could consider it a subpar year for us,” said sophomore Lorens Chan. “I think our preseason ranking was (near the) top five and then we ended up like 15 or 20 or something, so we did drop, and I mean we didn’t have that great of a fall and the spring wasn’t too much better.”

The Bruins finished the season with only one tournament win, and that was back in early April at the Redhawk Invitational in Seattle, Wash.

That’s why leading up to the NCAA championship tournament, the Bruins really didn’t seem like they had too much to be proud of.

Yet that is only how the wins and losses read.

Taking a closer look at the Bruins’ season, they were gathering momentum and peaked at the right time.

“We barely made it to nationals by sneaking in at regionals – (we) had to fight really hard – and had to come back in that (regional) tournament too, so we had a lot of momentum from that going into the national championship,” Garrick said.

And even the word “barely” is an understatement. It doesn’t adequately reflect the “Tiger Woods’ red-shirted Sundays” kind of fortitude that was demonstrated at the 18th hole on the last day of regionals.

Sitting just outside national championship qualification in sixth place, the Bruins needed clutch birdies by both senior Anton Arboleda and Chan to capture the fifth and last spot for a berth into the national championship tournament.

This sort of momentum is exactly what stats and win-loss analysis leave out.

It’s the sort of energy and team vibe that is difficult to talk about and is usually only expressed in trite bromides and aphorisms.

Yet this is exactly what accounts for the strong tournament finish that had even the Bruins scratching their heads.

“It was some sort of a surprise because this is one of the strongest fields all year,” Chan said.

But how did it all come together at the end?

“I think in the beginning of the season our attitudes weren’t as good, and we switched 180 degrees,” Arboleda said. “We had a chat with Doug Tewell in Oklahoma. He won a couple of tournaments on the PGA senior tour. He approached us one day at lunch and said, ‘The one thing that I wished I would have done when I was your age was have a better attitude and be more appreciative of everything.’ I think everyone took that to heart. We all did.”

It wasn’t a John Wooden saying verbatim, but it resembled one in meaning. The Bruins certainly made the best of their national championship berth, capturing the sixth seed for match play in the quarterfinals.

“I think that the program speaks for itself,” Arboleda said after playing his last tournament as a UCLA golfer. “We win national championships and our coach gives us everything that we need to be successful. Even though we didn’t play well during the middle of the season, it was good to see us come together in the end, and that’s why we play, that’s why we work so hard.”