If Vanderbilt is to advance to an 11th straight NCAA Championship, it will have to do so without Gordon Sargent.
Sargent did not travel with the Commodores to Amherst, Virginia, where they will compete as the third seed in the NCAA Amherst Regional beginning Sunday afternoon at Poplar Grove Golf Club. It marks the third time this season that the struggling senior has been out of the lineup.
John Broderick, who missed his first tournament of the season at last month’s SEC Championship, will be inserted back into the starting five, joining Jackson Van Paris, Wells Williams, Ryan Downes and Chase Nevins, while Ben Loomis is the substitute. The first round will begin at 1:45 p.m. ET Sunday, a day earlier than originally scheduled, because of inclement weather.
SEC foes LSU and Oklahoma are the top two teams in Vanderbilt’s region, which also includes Pepperdine, Tennessee, Arizona, Stanford, Wake Forest, Arkansas, Florida Gulf Coast, Kent State, Princeton and Howard.
“Just like we’ve always done, we’re just trying to put our best foot forward for this tournament,” Vanderbilt head coach Scott Limbaugh said on Saturday night via phone. “We’re going to put our feet in the ground and go compete. We’ve got a good golf course, and a lot of things we can’t control relative to weather, and a really good field.
“We’ve gotta go do us and do it a little better than we did our last time out.”
Limbaugh did not rule out Sargent returning for the NCAA Championship, should the Commodores qualify.
Regardless of how he finishes his college career, Sargent, 21, is slated to join the PGA Tour this summer via the card he earned through the PGA Tour University’s Accelerated program two falls ago. He will debut alongside Florida State’s Luke Clanton at the RBC Canadian Open next month at TPC Toronto, and he is guaranteed full PGA Tour membership through the end of next season.
Sargent opted to defer his status last summer so he could return to Vanderbilt for his senior season, but it’s been a rough past year or so on the course for the former top-ranked amateur in the world. He was a first-team All-American and three-time Haskins Award finalist in each of his first three seasons while winning six times, including the 2022 NCAA Championship. He also was the school’s career scoring leader through three seasons (69.56), but his 73.63 average this season ranks last on the nine-player roster.
Sargent’s last top-10 anywhere came at last July’s Northeast Amateur. In eight college starts this season, he has just one top-30 finish and has placed outside the top 50 in all five starts this spring, including a T-75 at the SEC Championship. Only 15 of his 24 rounds have counted for the team this season after he had not counted a total of just nine times in his first three seasons combined.
He’s currently ranked No. 522 in the national collegiate rankings and has slipped to No. 19 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking.
Sargent told The Tennessean during Vanderbilt’s home event, the Mason Rudolph Championship, in April that he believed his struggles came from “changing some things” at the start of last summer to get ready for pro golf.
“Golf is a funny game,” Sargent added in that article. “One bad shot can kind of derail you a little bit. It’s one of those games that if you put your confidence in results, it’s probably pretty much always going to let to down.”
Vanderbilt has not finished better than third this season, though it hasn’t placed better than eighth in tournaments where Sargent didn’t play. Still, the Commodores remain No. 18 in the national rankings while Van Paris and Williams are ranked Nos. 23 and 34, respectively, and were each named to the All-SEC second team. Downes and Broderick are each ranked in the top 200 while Nevins slots in at No. 480 in the nation.
“It feels like a new season with a lot of new opportunities, and we need to appreciate those opportunities,” Limbaugh added in a school release. “I know this group has a burning desire to compete and to compete together with purpose and conviction. This time of year takes talent, but it also takes character and having a group of guys having fun and holding up our Vandy standards. It’s always important to remember that this is what everyone came here to do and who they want to do it with.”
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