They were third-place finishers in their respective conference championships last month, but nobody ever doubted that the Pac-12’s Arizona State and the Big 12’s Texas were national championship contenders.
The Sun Devils, playing less than 10 miles from their campus, and the Longhorns were the last two teams standing Tuesday after a wildly entertaining quarterfinal-semifinal day in the NCAA Championship at Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Arizona State and Texas will meet in the Final Match Wednesday with the winner claiming an NCAA crown.
Arizona State was pretty comfortable playing at home at Grayhawk a year ago before falling to Oklahoma in the semifinals. The Sun Devils had grabbed the top seed in match play by finishing at the top of the heap in stroke play a year ago.
The Sun Devils, No. 4 in the latest Golfstat rankings, were able to avenge that loss in Tuesday morning’s quarterfinals with a 3-2 victory over the top-ranked Sooners, the Big 12 champions.
In the afternoon semifinals, Arizona State knocked off defending national champion Pepperdine, the West Coast Conference champion that was ranked sixth, 4-1, to advance to the Final Match.
The difference? It might very well have been Scottsdale’s own, Preston Summerhays of the golfing Summerhays family.
The freshman, No. 84 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking (WAGR), began his day by dismantling Oklahoma’s Chris Gotterup, a redshirt senior from Little Silver, N.J. and No. 27 in the WAGR, 7 and 5. Gotterup had just found out that he had been named the winner of the Fred Haskins Award, presented by Stifel, that goes to the top player in Division I college golf.
In the afternoon, Summerhays won five straight holes to put Pepperdine’s Joe Highsmith, a senior from Lakewood, Wash. and No. 19 in the WAGR, in a 5-down hole, watched Highsmith battle all the way back to tie the match at the 16th and the kid was so rattled he won the last two holes to give Arizona State a critical point with a 2-up victory.
If you watched Summerhays win the U.S. Junior Amateur Championship at The Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio in 2019, you saw this coming.
Mason Andersen, a graduate student from Chandler, Ariz. and No. 61 in the WAGR, got another big point for Arizona State against Pepperdine as he made a birdie on the 19th hole to edge Dylan Menante, a junior from Carlsbad, Calif. and No. 15 in the WAGR.
Menante dropped in a birdie putt right on top of Andersen’s birdie on the 18th hole to send the match to extra holes.
David Puig, a senior from Spain and No. 9 in the WAGR, picked up another point for the Sun Devils in the semifinals as he edged Joey Vrzich, a redshirt senior from El Cajon, Calif. and No. 54 in the WAGR, 2 and 1.
Cameron Sisk, a senior from San Diego and No. 40 in the WAGR, came up with his second big point of the day for the Sun Devils as he claimed a 2 and 1 decision over Derek Hitchner, a senior from Minneapolis, Minn. and No. 72 in the WAGR.
Andersen, Puig and Sisk were all in the lineup for Arizona State in its 3-2 loss to Oklahoma in the semifinals a year ago.
Pepperdine’s lone point in the semifinals came from William Mouw, a junior from Chino, Calif. and No. 70 in the WAGR, as he earned a 3 and 2 victory over James Loew, a senior from Singapore.
Menante, Highsmith, Vrzich and Mouw were all in the lineup for the Waves’ 3-2 victory over Oklahoma in the Final Match a year ago at Grayhawk.
It has been three years since a young Texas team took out powerful Oklahoma State, which was looking for a second straight NCAA crown, in the semifinals before falling to a veteran Stanford team in the Final Match at The Blessings Golf Club in Fayetteville, Ark.
Cole Hammer, a senior from Houston and No. 13 in the WAGR, and Pierceson Coody, a senior from Plano, Texas and No. 3 in the WAGR, were both members of that team and both picked up big points in the Longhorns’ 3.5-1.5 semifinal win over Southeastern Conference champion Vanderbilt Tuesday.
It has been a long and winding road for Hammer since that NCAA postseason of three springs ago. He has twice represented the United States in the Walker Cup Match, both wins for the Red, White & Blue.
Hammer and Pierceson Coody were both members of the U.S. team that defeated Great Britain & Ireland, 14-12, a year ago in the rare spring edition of the Walker Cup Match held at the iconic Seminole Golf Club, the Donald Ross masterpiece in Juno Beach, Fla.
The timing might have hindered Texas’ postseason chances, although nobody was complaining about representing the U.S. in international competition. The Longhorns had their sights set on a long postseason run in the spring of 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic shut down the college golf season.
Vanderbilt came to the semifinals on a roll. After winning the always contentious SEC Championship with its match-play format mimicking the NCAA Championship, the Commodores won the team title in the Palm Beach Regional.
Vanderbilt’s Gordon Sargent, a freshman from Birmingham, Ala. and No. 14 in the WAGR, won the NCAA individual crown in a playoff Monday as the Commodores earned the top seed in a tiebreaker after sharing the top spot in the team competition with Oklahoma and North Carolina.
Vanderbilt, with Sargent claiming a 3 and 1 victory over Baard Skogen, a sophomore from Norway, knocked off Texas’ Big 12 rival Texas Tech, 3-2 in Tuesday morning’s quarterfinals.
But in seventh-ranked Texas, Vanderbilt might have run into the one team uniquely qualified to defeat the Commodores.
Hammer, with a tremendous amount of match-play experience in the bank, got the first point for the Longhorns with a 4 and 3 victory over Sargent, the newly minted NCAA individual champion.
Travis Vick, the tremendously talented junior from Houston and No. 26 in the WAGR, claimed a 4 and 3 victory over Reid Davenport, a senior from Austin, Texas and No. 41 in the WAGR.
Moments later, Pierceson Coody finished the job by completing a 3 and 2 victory over Cole Sherwood, a sophomore and another Austin guy, who is No. 45 in the WAGR.
Parker Coody, Pierceson’s twin brother, dropped a hard-fought 1-up decision to William Moll, a junior from Houston, to account for Vanderbilt’s full point. The Coody twins are the grandsons of 1971 Masters champion Charles Coody.
Parker Coody, though, had been Texas’ best player at Grayhawk as he was one of the three players who lost in the playoff to Sargent for the individual title Monday.
Texas’ Mason Nome, a junior from Houston, got a half-point
for the Longhorns as he battled Harrison Ott, a fifth-year player from
Brookfield, Wis., to a draw.
It was hard to imagine a scenario in which neither of the Oklahoma teams, the No. 1 Sooners, nor No. 2 Oklahoma State, made the semifinals.
While Arizona State was taking out Oklahoma in Tuesday morning’s quarterfinals, Texas was knocking off Oklahoma State, its ancient Big 12 rival, 3-2.
Parker Coody picked up a huge point with his 3 and 2 victory over Bo Jin, a sophomore from China and No. 29 in the WAGR. Jin had been the runnerup in the individual chase a year ago at Grayhawk and was the runnerup to Summerhays in the 2019 U.S. Junior Amateur at Inverness.
Hammer did his thing, claiming a 3 and 2 victory over another tough customer in the Cowboys’ Aman Gupta, a senior from Concord, N.C. and No. 58 in the WAGR.
After Oklahoma State’s Eugenio Chacarra, a senior from Spain and No. 4 in the WAGR, pulled the Cowboys even at 2-2 with an emotional 1-up win over Pierceson Coody, it all came down to Nome and his match with Jonas Baumgartner, a sophomore from Germany.
Nome had built a 4-up advantage only to see Baumgartner battle back to 1-down heading to the ninth tee in the match that started off the 10th tee. A birdie at the ninth hole gave Baumgartner a 2-up win and sent the Longhorns to the semifinals.
Much as it had been a week earlier with the women at Grayhawk, there is nothing quite like quarterfinal-semifinal day in the NCAA Championship with all kinds of matches pitting top-100 players in the WAGR.
The final day of May Madness gives way to the first of June with
what figures to be a fascinating match between Arizona State and Texas with an NCAA crown on the line.
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