Coaches don’t call 8 a.m. team meetings without a purpose.
Northwestern men’s golf coach Pat Goss had a clear objective when he met with his players early Tuesday morning — shake them up.
“He was basically saying, ‘Enough of that (poor play),'” senior Tom Johnson said. “Time to put up or shut up.”
The Wildcats didn’t put up this past weekend at the Fossum/TaylorMade Invitational, where they took 10th place out of 14 teams and beat only one Big Ten school.
Goss had to knock some sense into his players if they were going to perform well at this weekend’s Big Ten championships in Ann Arbor, Mich.
“The main thing that (Coach) told us was he was not going to leave here Thursday unless he had a team that was going to win Big Tens,” senior Casey Strunk said.
The Cats will need all the motivation they can get for this weekend’s event. The players said unless they leave Michigan on Sunday with the championship trophy, the team won’t be playing in the NCAA Regionals for the first time in nearly a decade.
Strunk said he players needed to reaffirm their confidence in their abilities — something that was missing in the last tournament of the regular season.
“Whether we win or lose (at Big Tens), it’s just going to be an (issue of) attitude or confidence level,” Strunk said. “It’s not going to come from something going our way on the golf course on Saturday.”
By the time the 15-minute team meeting had concluded, Goss had pushed back Johnson, the No. 1 player, to the No. 3 spot, and Strunk, the No. 2 player, to the No. 4 spot.
He assigned junior Dillon Dougherty the first spot for the championships and put freshman David Merkow at No. 2.
“(Goss) just said that Dillon and David were the only ones that were really competing this season,” Strunk said. “I think it was basically to fire Tom and I up a little bit.”
Dougherty had the team’s top scores at the Fossum/TaylorMade Invitational, where he placed 13th, and at the Kepler Intercollegiate Invitational in April, where he placed 11th.
Johnson, who took second place individually at last year’s Big Ten tourney, said he visited NU’s sports psychologist, Jeff Fishbein, after the team meeting Tuesday.
“I doubt my fundamentals (on the golf course),” he said. “If I hit a bad shot, I’m thinking about what I did. If you practice every single day, why would you start doubting yourself?”
Johnson said he left Fishbein’s office ready for the weekend and with a renewed confidence in his ability to compete. For the team to win the championships, he said, he thinks three NU players will have to place in the top ten.
But winning won’t be easy.
The reigning champion, No. 12 Minnesota, will be trying for a three-peat. Two of its players are ranked in the top 50 in the country — two-time All-American Justin Smith has won two tournaments this year, and Bronson La’Cassie is a likely candidate for Big Ten Freshman of the Year.
Indiana, Illinois and Purdue also will provide competition for the No. 52 Cats. Indiana’s Jeff Overton, ranked No. 10 nationally, will be in competition for the individual title. His team is coming off a win at the Fossum, and the Illini took second there, creaming NU by 27 strokes.
But despite NU’s poor performance in its last regular season tournament, players said they have a shot at the title.
“We’ve had a lot of guys play well in tournaments this year; we just haven’t really done it together,” Dougherty said. “This weekend it’s just up to each individual guy to play well.”
