May 21—It is, at this point, a fact of life for New Mexico men’s golf.
“That’s the frustrating part,” head coach Jake Harrington chuckled Monday. “Sometimes we like to put our backs against the wall.”
Case in point: At last week’s NCAA Regional in Tallahassee, Florida, the Lobos got closer to said wall than they might’ve preferred. UNM finished the first round at 3-under (good for fifth place in an event where only the top five teams move on to the national championship) before shooting 1-over to finish Tuesday’s second round in fourth place.
Most glaring? Playing at Seminole Legacy Golf Club, UNM finished 8-over between holes No. 5 and No. 7 on Tuesday. If the Lobos had been in this spot more than a few times this season, Harrington still felt he needed to talk his team through it entering a pivotal second round.
“A lot of it was, ‘guys, we don’t need to be (heroes), we just need to make sure that we give ourselves good looks at birdie,” Harrington recalled. “‘And if we miss the birdie putt, we’ll tap in for par. You don’t need to do anything special.'”
The Lobos’ final round, punching its ticket to this week’s NCAA Championship? 12-under.
Message received.
“I wish I could, you know, figure out what I said after the second round every time and just say it before every round — for some reason, it doesn’t hit like it does before that final round,” Harrington said. “But these guys have a ton of fight.”
And that fight is precisely why the Lobos like their odds heading into this week’s NCAA Championships.
Starting play Friday at Omni La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad, California, UNM will open with 54 holes of stroke play before the field of 30 is cut in half. The remaining 15 will play a final round of stroke play to cut the field to eight before match play decides the national champion.
UNM is playing in its third straight championship and 45th overall. The program has not qualified for match play since 2013, when the Lobos fell to national champion Alabama in the quarterfinals.
But if this is the year UNM makes it back, the Lobos’ regional performance might provide a strong case as for why. After struggling with the front nine in the second round, the team shot 9-under in that same spot with no bogeys in the final round.
“That tells you a lot about our program right there as far as how we’re playing, the way we’re trending,” Harrington said. “That they can come into a stretch that wasn’t as good the day before, erase it from their memory and go out there and just try to get one more every time.”
To Harrington, UNM started to find its groove at the Southern Highlands Collegiate this March in Las Vegas. Playing at Southern Highlands Country Club, UNM competed in a stacked field featuring reigning national champion Auburn and a bevy of other teams ranked in NCAA golf’s top 50.
In the first round, they shot 7-over. The second, 7-over.
The final round? Five-under to notch a third-place finish behind the Tigers and UNLV.
If it isn’t always the preferred way to get results, UNM’s recent run of strong finishes have done just that.
“It really puts a lot of confidence in these guys,” Harrington continued, “and it allows them to really see it doesn’t matter what name’s on a bag and who cares what conference somebody’s in or where they’re from — we can be with anybody. They should be nervous to play with us.”
It’s also something the Lobos themselves have come to embrace. The only player to appear in all of UNM’s last three NCAA runs, senior Carson Herron joins his dad, Tim “Lumpy” Herron, in a small group of Lobos to appear in three or more national championships.
“(We’re) gritty and resilient,” Carson Herron said. “The final-round push we’ve been making kind of encompasses that. Sometimes we don’t always have a great round in the middle or the first round, but we bounce back from a tough (round), get everything in a row and go out again and get after it.”
“We come out a little bit nervous in the first round and look around and see the names of other guys and the schools that they’re out of, and kinda don’t play our game,” junior Mesa Falleur added. “But in the final round, we realize that we’re playing a lot worse than we should be.
“And then we do play well and we see, ‘oh wow, we’re pretty good.'”
Whether that’s good enough to break through and make a run remains to be seen.
But a strong finish would certainly help.
“If we need to, we will just keep doing what we’ve been doing the last few final rounds,” Herron said. “Just progress and see where it puts us.”
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