TUSCALOOSA ?? The collegiate golf season begins in September and continues through the final round of the NCAA Championships in June, with a break, for most, during the frostier months where courses are unplayable in December and January.
It’s only October, just one month into the season, but already the University of Alabama golf team has not only set a record pace but has set three records. The first of the milestones came September 25, 2006 when the program received its first No. 1 national ranking. In a rating based on strength of fields and a poll revered by collegiate coaches, Alabama went No. 1 in the Golfweek/Sagarin rankings. Briefly dropping two spots for a week, Alabama is the current No. 1 ranked golf team again this week.
Milestones number two, three and four came this past Tuesday, October 10. Alabama won its third straight tournament championship??out of three---at the Jerry Pate National Intercollegiate. No other Alabama golf team since golf became an official varsity sport in 1952 had ever won three in a row. And no other Alabama golf team had been able to win its own JPNI tournament which began in the mid 1980’s.
En route to the JPNI win, Alabama set the school 54-hole team record, 819. The previous best was 824, set at the April 15-17, 1982 Alabama Intercollegiate. And, in producing the 2006 JPNI medalist, individual champion Joseph Sykora set the school’s individual 54-hole record. The junior from Daphne shot 67-67-65/199 (-14) to win his first collegiate championship. The 199 bettered Alabama’s previous best co-held by Nick Rousey and European PGA Tour player Lars Brovold. Rousey, a Pensacola, Fla., native who plays professionally now as one of the leading money winners on the NGA Hooters Tour, won the 2002 University of Tennessee Coca-Cola Tournament of Champions with a scorecard that read 70-64-66/200. Brovold shot 65-65-70/200 en route to a second place finish at the 2004 JPNI.
The team is back in action this weekend, playing Saturday and Sunday in East Tennessee State’s Bank of Tennessee Intercollegiate among a field that includes 11 of 15 teams that are ranked among Golfweek’s Top 50. Only one other Alabama golf team has won more tournaments in a single season than this current version. Alabama’s 1972 team, powered by a freshman named Jerry Pate, won four tournaments: the Tupelo Invitational, the Maxwell Air Force Base tournament, the West Florida Invitational and the St. Andrews (Scotland) Invitational. This current version of the Tide has at least eight chances, starting this weekend through the last regular season event in May, to tie that 1972 team’s record and try for an unprecedented fifth team win.
Alabama is also making a climb that could result in another record, a top ranking in the coaches’ poll. In the Golf Coaches Association of America/Bridgestone Coaches Poll released Thursday, it is ranked No. 4, its highest ranking ever. Alabama received four first place votes in the poll to move up from No. 7 to No. 4. Voted on by a panel of head coaches who are members of the GCAA, the next poll will be released October 26.
