Tennessee Golf advances to 4th round and moves up leaderboard

The Tennessee men’s golf team continues to climb the leaderboard at the NCAA Championships in Carlsbad, California. A 3rd round total of 1-under leaves Tennessee four shots out of 8th heading into the final day of stroke play. Volquest caught up with coach Brennan Webb to get his thoughts on the day.

“A little up, little down,” Webb said. “Certainly had an incredibly good start, dream start really. Then we turned back into the wind and struggled a little bit for a few holes and then had a good strong finish with some clutch up and downs on the last couple holes. Jackson (Herrington) making birdie on 18 Lance making a great par. And Josh getting up and down for par. So all in all, pretty ecstatic to be one of the last 15 teams standing at the end of the year.”

The field was cut in half after Sunday’s round. There are several good teams competing to get into the final eight for match play starting on Tuesday.

“I think it’s going to require a really good round of golf,” Webb said. “There’s probably seven or eight teams for probably one or two spots. And so it’ll take a special round on us to be probably the low score of those guys and go from there and see what the day holds.”

At one point, Tennessee had the best round on the course and for a time were 9-under for the round as a team. They hit a wall after turning back into the wind and that’s just part of the game.

“It’s just college golf,” Webb said. “You turn back into the wind and there’s super hard holes and a couple of guys miss a couple short putts and don’t get it up and down. It looks like it’s a lull, but it’s really not. It’s just part of the action of 18 holes when you’re counting 5 guys and they just happen to bunch up today, but certainly nothing to be alarmed or concerned about it. It was more just the tough conditions in that moment while we were playing those holes I think that’s more to explain it than anything.”

Webb is proud of his team. He feels like they’ve battled hard all week and they’ve certainly given themselves a chance tomorrow with a really good round. 

“I don’t think anybody ever thinks, oh, well, we maxed out our potential,” Webb said about potentially having not played their best to this point. “But I think that we’ve battled all week and that’s the thing that I’m most proud of. I think we didn’t really take advantage of our early tee time the first day and that kind of put us a little bit behind the 8 ball, but man, we’ve battled these last 36 holes to give ourselves a chance to get into match play tomorrow.”

Tennessee will be in the first groupings out which start around 1:30 eastern time.