Tide Golfers Get NCAA Postseason Bid; Head to Central Regional
5/22/2002 12:00:00 AM | Men's Golf
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TUSCALOOSA – The NCAA announced its 2002 golf postseason championships field Monday evening, and the University of Alabama men’s golf team is among it.
The Crimson Tide, which has produced one tournament championship and five top five team finishes this season, is the ten seed in the NCAA Central Regional which will be held in Little Rock, Arkansas May 16-18, 2002.
With 292 Division I teams competing in the sport, men’s golf is the third largest male participatory sport in the NCAA, just behind men’s basketball (324 teams) and cross country (302). The NCAA Men’s Golf Championships include three regionals, the East, West and Central, each with a field of 27 teams and six individual qualifiers from teams that did not make it into the regional. The top ten team finishers and top two individuals from each region advance to the NCAA finals which are May 29 through June 1 in Columbus, Ohio. The East Regional is in Roswell, Ga., and the West in Albuquerque, N.M.
“This has been or goal, our mission all season, to make it into the postseason.,” said Alabama head men’s golf coach Dick Spybey who is making his seventh team appearance and has produced individual qualifiers three other times for a total of 10 NCAA postseason appearances since 1991. “The fact that we were seeded in the top 10 in the Central Region shows the respect that we’ve gotten across the nation, and hopefully we’ll play up to that respect. I think from top to bottom this may be the best group we’ve ever had as far as student-athletes and positive role models. I’ve been really pleased with how they’ve responded in all facets of life. I knew they were talented, I knew they could play well.
“This is a great regional for us to be in. It’s against some teams that we have participated against. We schedule according to this possibility. We get out and about during the year to play against nationally ranked teams a couple of times a year, and this is the reason we do so. Our kids shouldn’t be intimidated by any of this because we are familiar with many of these teams, and we should feel good about our chances.”
Alabama will take to the NCAA Regional a group of five golfers that includes seniors Nick Rousey (72.33) and Jan Are Larsen (74.22), sophomores Lars Brovold (73.27) and Mobile’s Austin Hynson (74.00) and freshman Clint Provost (72.37). Rousey and Provost were 2002 All-SEC selections.
It marks the third trip to nationals for Larsen, an NCAA individual qualifier in 1999 and 2001. “It’s fun, isn’t it?,” said Larsen who will have now made the NCAA Championships in three of the four years he’s been at Alabama. “I’ve played alone in it and I played with Nick in it last year. That was nice having the two of us, but it’s not the same as being there with your team. It makes a big difference when you’re not out there competing alone. And I like the fact that we are playing in the Central Regional because we’ve played against a lot of the teams in that regional before and we’ve had success against them, so that’s going to help our confidence going in.”
Rousey, a two-time JUCO national champion who transferred to Alabama last season is looking forward to the challenge of making it to the finals to cap his senior year. “It’s good that we’re going. It was one of our goals at the beginning of the season. It’s the first step to getting to the finals, but we just have to go and play. It’s a good field with a bunch of teams we’ve seen before, so we’ll see what happens. We’ll definitely have to play well.”
Alabama’s first round will find it paired with LSU and Tulsa. The trio of teams will tee off around 12:18 CT on May 16. “I think a good thing is we’re playing with LSU. We know them. We’ve played with them before, so that will help relax us. There won’t be as much pressure because we know the guys,” said Rousey. “The chemistry of our team has been very good this year. We get along very well, we root for each other. We pull for each other, and it should carry over into the regionals.”
The top ten seeds in the Central Regional include, in order, TCU, N.C. State, Oklahoma State, Virginia Tech, Oklahoma, Toledo, Purdue, Lamar, Baylor and Alabama.
