Men’s Golf

Freshman David Nyfjäll walked up to the 17th hole of the The Club at Chatham Hills in Westfield, Indiana with a 9-under-par score.

Nyfjäll, who ended the first day of the Chatham Hills Collegiate leading the field at 7-under, had struggled to start his final round, bogeying three of his first five holes. But he had rebounded to find himself entering the final two holes with a chance to rise to first place.

Following birdies on the final two holes, Nyfjäll was back at 11-under and in first place. When the final golfers wrapped up, Nyfjäll and IUPUI’s Austin Crowder were named the individual champions of the Chatham Hills Collegiate.

“It just feels great,” Nyfjäll said. “I really don’t know how to put it in words. It just feels really good.”

While Nyfjäll provided the Cats with their second-straight individual champion, NU was unable to collect its second consecutive first-place finish, ending the two-day tournament in second place.

After the first two rounds, the Cats found themselves two strokes behind Marquette. But an 11-under final round from Purdue propelled the Boilermakers to the top of the leaderboard, while an even-par day from NU was not enough to claim first.

“I thought we really had a good chance to win the tournament this week and we let it slip,” coach David Inglis said. “Purdue obviously played a great round today so not taking anything away from them. I just felt like there was too many sloppy mistakes for us at the end and we just didn’t get the job done.”

In addition to Nyfjäll, sophomore Eric McIntosh also finished in the top-10 of the 66-person field. Despite a 2-over first round, McIntosh managed to rebound and finished tied for sixth with a final score of 3-under.

Junior Everton Hawkins was the next highest-finisher on the team with a 2-under final score, placing him tied for 12th. Senior Ryan Lumsden finished at 1-over and freshman Lucas Becht ended at 7-over to round out the starting lineup. Sophomore Harrison Murphy — who competed as an independent — finished tied for 48th.

Besides Nyfjäll and McIntosh, Inglis said the rest of the lineup was not on the top of their games in Indiana.

“Everybody else was just a little bit sloppy,” Inglis said. “We didn’t quite have our best stuff. There were flashes of good things… We just didn’t quite put it all together.”

While NU did finish with a tournament-high 65 birdies and five eagles, the Cats hit their fair share of bogeys, especially during the final round. Becht, Hawkins and Murphy all hit triple- or quadruple-bogeys Monday. Before that day, NU had hit only four triple-bogeys all season.

The last round of the tournament was categorized by poor weather. Featuring strong winds and cold temperatures, every team but Purdue shot their worst round of the tournament.

McIntosh said the poor weather was actually an advantage for him because of its similarity to the weather seen in Chicago and his native Scotland.

“Obviously, second looks good on paper sometimes, but we always like to win especially when we have the chance to win,” McIntosh said. “That’s making us a little bit down but I think we can still look at it as a pretty solid week overall.

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