The Marquette men’s golf team went into the final round of the Xavier Invitational with aspirations to be tournament champion. The players responded with their worst team score of the tournament and finished in third place, nine shots back from tournament champion, Akron.
Junior Kelly Kretz scored the team’s best final round with a 4-under-par 68 as well as the team’s best tournament score at 6-under-par 210. He finished the tournament in fifth place, four shots back of the tournament champion, Akron junior Lucas Murray.
Kretz was very pleased with his final round performance but thought he could have performed better.
“This was one of the best ball striking rounds I have had in long time,” he said. “I came out and birdied three of the first four holes. (The final) round could have been much lower if I had made a couple more putts.”
Three more of Marquette’s five golfers joined Kretz in the top 25 of the tournament. Senior Mike McDonald tied for 10th place at 2-under-par 214, redshirt sophomore Matt Haase tied for 15th at even-par 216 and redshirt junior Ben Sieg tied for 24th place at 2-over-par 218.
Despite getting four players into the top 25, Haase said the third place team finish and his 15th place individual finish were both disappointing.
“We all know we could have played a lot better,” he said. “Individually, 15th in that field was no good and shooting 75 (in the final round) was no good. I left a lot of shots out there. If I just would have played solid golf I could have shot in the 60s.”
Kretz reiterated Haase’s feeling that the finish was disappointing and suggested that the team needs to cut back on mistakes.
“I had lost four shots in the second round Monday,” Kretz said. “Ben was 4-under-par (Tuesday) and then hit a ball out of bounds on the par-5 15th and took a double bogey. (We’ve) got to stop throwing away shots like that.
“You’re never going to eliminate mistakes, but we need to minimize them. I feel like we should have won the tourney. We all did throw away a lot of shots — especially the first day.”
Haase went into the final round as the team’s best scorer this tournament. He said difficulties off the tee aided his slide down the leader board, where he started the day tied for fourth.
“What led to not being very good off the tee was bad range session this morning with the driver — more or less not going through my routine on the tee,” Haase said. “I wasn’t quite as focused on the tee as I was yesterday. I don’t know why I couldn’t snap out of it.”
McDonald said the team took steps toward winning its first tournament and hopes to do so in the Firestone Invitational this Monday in Akron, Ohio.
“That’s the first thing you need to do: give yourself an opportunity to win. We did something right to get ourselves in that situation,” McDonald said. “We know we can be in that position, and now it’s just a matter of finishing off events.”