DOUBLE BOGEY
Energy gained from back-to-back wins and a promising spring end for No. 1 USC women.
Driving west on the 10 Freeway, the USC women’s golf team sat in silence. Somewhere between Mesa, Ariz., where the Trojans were playing a practice round for the Clover Cup on March 12, and the state border, the news started to settle in. The season was over. No one knew what to say in the face of the coronavirus outbreak. Justin Silverstein sat behind the wheel of one of the team’s two cars.
“Everyone that was on this roster thinks this team had a pretty good chance to win a title, as good of a chance as anybody,” the USC coach said. “It’s just sad.”
After a lackluster fall in which USC didn’t win any of its four tournaments, the Trojans ended the shortened season at No. 1 in Golfweek’s rankings.
The team didn’t panic during the slow start. The Trojans were pacing themselves, junior Alyaa Abdulghany said. They were chasing an NCAA title, which USC last won in 2013.
That aspiration is now gone.
“It just kind of feels like we were preparing for nothing,” Abdulghany said three days after the NCAA announced its decision to cancel all winter and spring championships. The Trojans were rounding into form with wire-to-wire victories at the Rebel Beach Showdown and the Bruin Wave Invitational, finishing the latter tournament in San Luis Obispo with just four players.
When junior Gabriela Ruffels had to withdraw in the first round because of an injury, USC couldn’t afford any mistakes as it didn’t have the opportunity to drop a poor score. Abdulghany got the news of Ruffels’ injury while on the course. The All-American remained confident.
“I was like, ‘It doesn’t matter,’ ” said Abdulghany, who placed sixth individually. “We still have the best four players out in the field and we’re going to make it happen this week.”
All four Trojans placed in the top 11. Amelia Garvey recorded her third straight fifth-place finish. The junior from New Zealand was playing “the best golf of her life,” Silverstein said.
Garvey’s emergence helped the Trojans overcome first-team All-American Jennifer Chang’s decision to go pro during the fall. Chang, a junior, was 11th in the World Amateur Golf rankings when she entered the LPGA Q-Series event in October. She finished ninth in the eight-round event to earn professional status.
The uncertainty surrounding Chang’s status scrambled the Trojans during the fall, Silverstein said. The lineup that returned all five starters from last season was in sudden disarray. They had to hold qualifying practice rounds to identify their third, fourth and fifth starters among a deep team.
USC, with its preseason No. 1 ranking, settled for fifth-, second-, third- and fourth-place finishes during the fall. The Trojans restarted the spring with a second-place finish at the Northrup Grumman Regional Challenge, which led to consecutive wins to finish the year. Ruffels, the 2019 U.S. Women’s Amateur champion, won the Rebel Beach Showdown in Las Vegas, where the Trojans placed four golfers in the top five.
“In the spring, you saw a group that started to really settle in,” Silverstein said. “You saw some people’s games take off.”
The growth made the sudden stop even more gutting for the second-year head coach.
“This is the time of year that we usually hunker down as a team and we spend 20 hours a week together and all the time on the road,” Silverstein said. “It’s a very strange, surreal feeling that we have basically six months off until we compete again.”
From waking up every day at 5:05 a.m. for 7 a.m. practices, Silverstein is now passing time by filing mundane expense reports, putting together the team’s schedule for next season — it’s not daunting, he assured — and catching up on “Westworld.” The third season of the HBO show premiered on March 15.
He also can’t help but think about the team’s return next season. The Trojans will replace seniors Allisen Corpuz, a top-50 amateur in the world, and Aiko Leong with high school AllAmericans Brianna Navarrosa and Christine Wang.
“We’re definitely reloading,” Silverstein said, “and we’ll be ready to go come August.”
The No. 1 team in the nation would not be deterred by a little rain. So the Pepperdine men’s golf team grabbed its umbrellas and coats, ready to practice. Then the Waves were met with the only thing that could stop them in their tracks.
The NCAA was canceling its winter and spring championships.
“It’s kind of just a punch in the gut,” senior Joshua McCarthy said.
The COVID-19 pandemic knocked the Waves down when they were at their highest: a No. 1 ranking for the first time in school history; one of the deepest rosters in the nation; a redshirt senior in the twilight of one the program’s best careers and a freshman just starting another.
Coach Michael Beard said it was like “all the stars aligned.” But Pepperdine’s hope for its second NCAA title quickly turned starcrossed.
“I think this is the first time in a long time where we’ve had a realistic shot like we’re coming in with the expectation that we want to win the national championship this year,” McCarthy said. “For a school like Pepperdine, it makes [the cancellation] a little bit harder because it’s not like you have this opportunity year in and year out.”
This season has been “a long time coming,” he added.
Beard led the Waves to five straight NCAA regionals and to the NCAA championships in 2017 and 2019, but the coach looked at a stacked lineup and easily envisioned much larger things than last year’s 11th-place finish at the championships.
Redshirt senior Sahith Theegala, who holds the school record for career scoring average, returned this season after an injury. His comeback, coupled with the recruitment of freshman William Mouw — who, at 18, won the 2019 California Amateur Championship to become one of the youngest to win the tournament — gave the Waves two superbly strong players.
Theegala and Mouw were on pace for the first under-70 single-season scoring averages in school history. The senior averaged 69.04 per round, Mouw 69.96.
The Waves had four more players who also played at the U.S. Amateur Championship in August: senior Clay Feagler, junior RJ Manke, and sophomores Joe Highsmith and Derek Hitchner. The six-man group was tied with Arizona State for the most from one school in the field.
“We were ready to play with the big programs,” Beard said. “It didn’t matter where or when, the guys would be ready to bring their game.”
Knowing the type of talent he had, Beard loaded the schedule to test the players. He pestered the Hawaii coach for a spot to the Amer Ari Invitational, an elite tournament that Pepperdine had not played in since 2006.
In a field with seven top-25 teams, the Waves fell to seventh place after the first round, tormented by the unique Bermuda greens of the Waikoloa Kings’ Course in Waimea, Hawaii. They adjusted to the difficult putting conditions and the changing wind and climbed into a tie for fourth after the second round, but they were still 12 strokes behind leader Georgia Tech.
The goal entering the final round was to just try to get a shot at the title, Beard said.
The team did much better.
The Waves fired an 18under-par 270 on the final day to win the tournament by two shots with a final round that tied the secondbest in program history.
“It was the best win I’ve been a part of,” Beard said.
Combined with the previous weekend’s victory at the Southwest Invitational, the Waves won consecutive tournaments for the second time in program history and the first time since 1996.
On the flight home, players and coaches were still in awe of how they pulled off the comeback. The win showcased exactly what Beard loved about the team: its depth, from junior Joey Vrzich’s two birdies in the final two holes to Feagler’s even-par tournament, to the two freshmen who stole the show.
Dylan Menante finished eagle-birdie-eagle and Mouw capped his tournament with a birdie and eagle before winning medalist honors in a playoff.
The talented freshmen make the uncertain future a little bit brighter for the Waves.
Beard knows Theegala, the No. 3 amateur in the world, will go pro. The other seniors, McCarthy and Feagler, could return with additional eligibility granted by the NCAA to spring athletes.
Beard acknowledges he doesn’t know whether the Waves can recapture the magic of the season.
He is hopeful they can reload, though.
“The bar has been set,” Beard said. “I think that there’s so many of the guys that have experienced that that I think that they will find a way to pull everyone else along to get to that top again.”
The Pepperdine men’s team was riding a first-ever top ranking before the pandemic. By Thuc Nhi Nguyen