Winning Big 12 set up UT
Title snapped string of defeats, positions team for NCAA tournament.
After breaking through with its first tournament victory of the season — the Big 12 championship — Texas’ men’s golf team at least has a full head of steam for the NCAA Southeast Regional, which begins Thursday in Alabama.
The conference championship win at the Whispering Pines course in Trinity was Texas’ fifth Big 12 title, and it led to a No. 3 seed in the 14-team regional field at the Auburn University Club in Auburn.
Texas’ season had been fraught with unmet expectations — until it wrested the Big 12 crown away from surprising Texas Tech on the back nine of the final day. The Longhorns had gone without a victory in all 10 of the tournaments they’d played heading into the Big 12s. And coach John Fields said the team is right where it needs to be at the most important time of the season.
“We have been working to-
ward being ready for the postseason, and right now we are ready,” Fields said. “Our practices and our thoughts have been predicated on giving ourselves the best opportunity to compete. This is kind of what you envision.
“We’re just now getting to the point of doing what we thought we might be able to do at the beginning of the year.”
Redshirt freshman Beau Hossler was named Big 12 newcomer of the year — the fifth-straight Longhorn to claim that honor (Brandon Stone (2013), Jordan Spieth (2012), Toni Hakula (2011) and Cody Gribble (2010).
Hakula, a senior, and junior Kramer Hickok joined Hossler on the all-conference team. Fields was coach of the year.
“I’ve been working on the right things for a while now,” Hossler said after the team’s victory in the Big 12 tournament. “It had been frustrating because I wasn’t seeing results until the last three or four weeks. I’m enjoying playing for this team because I’m around a lot of really competitive guys, and that’s only helped me improve as a player.
“It’s nice to get (a win) under our belts and prove we can do it.”
There were a handful of factors involved with the Longhorns’ winless streak, including a wrist injury to Hickok and the maturation of the team’s younger players.
And Fields likes to challenge the Longhorns by having his squad play the toughest courses against the best competition in order to have his team ready for this most important part of the season.
“The kinds of courses we play and the fields we play against dictate that there needs to be a lot of patience and some seasoning to your team and its players,” Fields said. “Essentially, we didn’t have that early in the season. There was a learning curve that we had to address.”
The low five teams and the low individual not on those teams from each regional will advance to the Men’s Division I championships at Prairie Dunes Country Club in Hutchinson, Kan., May 23-28. That’s the same course where Texas won the Big 12 title in 2013, in frigid and windy conditions.