With the beginning of the spring season just around the corner for Northwestern’s men’s golf team, assistant coach Steve Bailey has high hopes.
“Our expectations are always to make the postseason,” Bailey said. “Our goals are always to be playing and to have a chance to win the national championship on our final day.”
Standing in the way of that goal is the team’s relative inexperience in collegiate competition. Only three players, seniors Dan Doyle and Kyle Moore and sophomore Jonathan Bowers, have ever competed in a tournament for the Wildcats before this fall. Even though transfer sophomore Matt Denison had a strong finish to his freshman year at Lehigh University, no one outside of Doyle, Moore and Bowers has played a single hole at the Big Ten championships.
“Obviously, you’d like to have guys that have a little more tournament experience,” Bailey said. “But it’s pretty promising for us that we’ve been able to put eight guys in the lineup in the fall season.”
All eight members of the team were able to play in at least one tournament in the fall season, which is more than can be said for last year’s team. While Denson and freshmen Josh DuPont and Ravi Patel did not manage to post a top-20 finish in any tournament, the experience will no doubt prove valuable this spring.
By playing tournaments in the fall, Bailey said, the team’s younger players gained experience that will help the Cats prepare to finish the season with a berth in the Big Ten Championships.
“Every time you go out and play competitively, there’s something you can learn and take away from, both good things and bad,” Doyle said. “You can take the good things and start building in the back of your mind, and you can have those to build confidence off of. At the same time you can take the negative aspects and learn to address those to improve upon that.”
While the team’s new members performed well in the fall, sophomore David Lipsky might have turned the most heads. Lipsky, who didn’t qualify for any tournaments last year, shot an average of 2-over 73 per round in the fall, fourth best on the team behind Doyle, Moore, and junior Andy DeKeuster.
“I don’t know if anyone’s made a bigger improvement in their games,” Bailey said of Lipsky. “He had some great successes in some tournaments this summer, and I think it just really boosted his confidence. Just the attitude and the swagger that he carried into this year, he’s a totally different person.”
Lipsky credits much of his improvement to the senior leadership provided by Moore and Doyle, saying that this year’s seniors have kept the lines of communication on the team much more open than in past years.
But with Moore and Doyle finishing out their final year, providing some of that leadership may soon fall on the shoulders of Lipsky and Bowers, who was the only underclassman to qualify for a tournament last year.
“I see myself having to take on this role as a team leader (next year) since we’ve been here just a little longer than anyone on the team,” Lipsky said. “I think that experience will help more with helping (next year’s) freshmen and sophomores.”
But for now, the team is concentrating on starting the season, which beings Feb. 29 at the Puerto Rico Classic, on the right foot.
“I think we have a very good team,” Doyle said. “I think the fact that we have eight guys that are all capable of great individual accomplishments will really help us build off of each other’s successes. I only see us getting better as the year goes on.”
