Of the four Big 12 teams that were among the 30 that
qualified for the NCAA Championship, Oklahoma was the lowest-ranked by Golfstat at No. 17.
So maybe it’s just a testament to how strong the conference
was that it was the Sooners who were the last ones standing when the NCAA
Championship’s Final Match concluded at Rich Harvest Farms in Sugar Grove, Ill.
Wednesday.
Oklahoma earned its first national championship since 1989
with a 3.5-1.5 victory over defending national champion Oregon, ranked ninth.
It ended with Brad Dalke, a sophomore from Norman, Okla. and
the son of a national champion Sooner football player, holing a two-footer for
birdie to slay the giant-killer, Oregon’s Sulman Raza, a redshirt senior from
Eugene, Ore.
A year earlier it was Raza making the big putt on the 21st
hole on the Ducks’ home course at Eugene Country Club to win the national
championship for Oregon. He was at it again in Tuesday’s first two rounds of
match play, draining a 10-foot birdie putt for the clinching point that took
out No. 3 Oklahoma State in the quarterfinals, and defeating Vanderbilt’s
Matthias Schwab, the No. 5 player in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, 2-up, to
eliminate the No. 4 Commodores.
Raza battled back from an early 2-down deficit to square the
match with Dalke, but then Dalke pulled away with wins at 12, 14 and 15 to take
a 3-up lead with three to go. Dormie. Raza postponed the inevitable with an
improbable par save on 16, but Dalke finished him off at 17 for the third point.
The Sooners got Oregon down early as Blaine Hale, a
sophomore from Dallas, rolled to a 4 and 3 win over Norman Xiong, a freshman
from Canyon Lake, Calf., and Max McGreevy, a senior from Edmond, Okla., claimed
a 3 and 2 win over Edwin Yi, a sophomore from Beaumont, Calif.
Rylee Reinertson, a junior from Gibbon, Neb., dropped a 1-up
decision to Oregon’s Wyndham Clark, a redshirt senior from Denver who won the
Pac-12 individual title. And the match between Oklahoma’s Grant Hirschman, a
junior from Collierville, Tenn., and Ryan Gronland, a redshirt sophomore from
Pleasanton, Calif., was called a draw with the match all square through 17
holes when Dalke clinched the title for the Sooners.
“We didn’t have a weak link this week and that’s big because
when you’re playing team golf, a lot of times somebody just doesn’t have their
game, you know, doesn’t show up,” Ryan Hybl, Oklahoma’s eighth-year coach told
Andie Beene of the Oklahoma website. “And all these guys, everybody won a
match, at least one match and they all produced in stroke play. It was a great
week from start to finish for our guys.”
They finished fourth in the Stanford Regional, 14 shots
behind co-champions Stanford and Big 12 rival Baylor. But there were signs,
most notably Dalke blitzing the Stanford Golf Course with a 12-under 198 to
claim the individual title.
They were the only team beside stroke-play medalist
Vanderbilt to finish under par at 1-under 1,151 during four rounds of
qualifying.
And after match-play wins over Baylor in the quarterfinals
and Illinois in the semifinals, Oklahoma was a little grittier than a very
gritty Oregon team. It’s the stuff that national championships are made of and
Oklahoma had it all at Rich Harvest Farms.
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