In just his fourth career NCAA tournament, freshman Jake Katz led the Binghamton University golf team individually with his solid play at the Yale MacDonald Cup last weekend by hitting the ball as well as he has all year. The rest of the team, however, struggled to get any momentum going on what was a very penal course that did not allow for many birdie opportunities.

Because the Bearcats won the MacDonald Cup two out of the last three years, expectations were exceedingly high. The players put a lot of expectations on themselves and were unable to live up to them, finishing 16th out of 26 teams in the field, with only two players, Katz and sophomore Patrick Donovan, finishing in the top 50 individually.

‘It was not the most successful weekend and I place a lot of blame on our poor team placement on my behalf because I played very poorly,’ said senior captain Zach Vinal. ‘But we really didn’t play as badly as it seemed because it was very tough to get a feel for the course, and I remember being deathly afraid of Yale my freshman year and I think the younger guys handled it pretty well. The course just bites you so quick when you make mistakes. I just made some bad swings that turned into two double bogeys and I bogeyed five out of my last seven holes in the second round, and performances like that just won’t get the job done.’

Perhaps nobody felt the overly penal aspect of the course more than freshman Mike Surdey, whose 82 in the first round was largely due to a nine over par back nine performance characterized by a lot of missed greens and shots ending up in hazardous areas costing him penalty strokes. But the poor performances extended to the veterans on the team as well as the newcomers.

‘Ryan Gabel did not score well at all and will not be playing in the next tournament,’ said head coach Nick Lasky. ‘Yale was a course that should have played into Ryan’s game because he is very straight off the tee and hits a lot of greens, but there is not much more to say other than that the course just got the best of him.’

This weekend, a 12 team field will be squaring off at the Division I ECAC Championship at the Shelter Harbor private golf resort in Charleston, RI, in a tournament remarkably similar to last spring’s New England Championship, where the Bearcats will be playing teams like the University of Rhode Island, Connecticut, Yale, Harvard and St. Bonaventure, some of their fiercest old-time rivals from the past several years. The starting lineup will consist of Vinal, Donovan, Katz, Surdey and junior J.J. Shearer, who played well in the team playoffs this week and earned his way back into the starting lineup.

In contrast to the course last spring’s New England Championship was played on, the Shelter Harbor resort is a well maintained private resort in one of the best locations in Rhode Island. Situated right on the water, it offers challenging hazardous shots for the players on most holes, and a strong breeze from the water that will force players to play knock down, low altitude shots to avoid losing control of the ball.