Tag: true blue golf club

Arkansas State wins Golfweek Fall Challenge, picking up right where it left off last spring

Good memories may be just as important as good play, and in its season opener, Arkansas State had both.

Confidence carries over – season to season, venue to venue, roster to roster. Good memories may be just as important as good play, and in its season opener, Arkansas State had both.

Arkansas State head coach Mike Hagen can’t remember the last time, if ever, his Red Wolves won their first tournament out of the gate. But after closing out last season as the Sun Belt Conference champions, and thus earning an NCAA Regional berth, Hagen’s team rolled that momentum right through the summer and into Pawleys Island, South Carolina.

They won the Golfweek Fall Challenge on Sept. 10 by a 12-shot margin over Wright State.

“They’re really pumped,” Hagen said of the post-win vibe. “. . . I think it’s a big momentum thing for a team. They know they can win. We go and tee it up again in 10 days out in New Mexico.”

Scoring: Golfweek Fall Challenge

Three of the six men Hagen traveled to True Blue Golf Club for the Golfweek event had played there a year before. Scores can vary wildly at True Blue, a Mike Strantz design heavy on risk-reward. Last fall, Arkansas State was 36 under as a team, but only 8 under in the final round. The Red Wolves finished fourth, 11 shots behind Loyola Marymount, which came up a shot shy of the tournament scoring record of 48 under (still held by Campbell).

Still, Hagen liked the gameplan a year ago. His team played well, and they liked the place. Hagen can’t picture a better season opener, from venue to timing to format.

“I think the gameplan that we had last year was really solid and we kind of just took some of that into this year,” Hagen said. “Changed a few things up as well that we may have learned from playing the tournament and playing the golf course last year, and I think that kind of helped us play a little more consistent this year over the three rounds.”

Arkansas State won at 35 under this year and played the final round in 15 under. Patton Samuels, a junior at Austin Peay State, won the individual title at 15 under.

Hagen’s men still hit a lot of drivers this week, but there were holes – like Nos. 2 and 6, both par 4s – where a conservative strategy paid off. The field averaged over par on those holes for the week, but Arkansas State made up ground.

Hagen took into account history, spots on the course where a miss was particularly costly and hole locations.

“We were able to say hey, on X hole, we know that’s one that could really get you in trouble, we’re going to hit it at this spot on the green, if you roll a putt in great, if not we’re going to walk off with a par,” he said. “We’re not going to bring bogey or double into play.”

Arkansas State led the field in birdies and largely avoided big numbers. Three men placed in the top 6 individually: Jake Wallis was third, Jack Maxey fifth and Jake Lile tied for sixth. Wallis and Lile are both underclassmen and Maxey is a senior. The Red Wolves fivesome also included junior Thomas Schmidt and sophomore Milan Reed, and Hagen likes the mix of youth and experience there. Lile, Schmidt and Maxey competed in the NCAA Regional lineup.

Before last spring, Arkansas State last won the Sun Belt title in 2019. The team played the inaugural National Golf Invitational in 2023 and tied for sixth. Hagen always looks at the experiences that are carrying over.

“Going into this year, we bring back our top 3 players and only one of them is a senior,” Hagen said. “You add another senior who has been in and out of our lineup and some of the young, newer talent we’ve got. I think it’s helped them get comfortable to where they can step in and perform right away.”

Where to play golf around Myrtle Beach: Golfweek’s Best public-access courses

Thanks to Golfweek’s Best rankings, we break out the top courses around Myrtle Beach.

Looking to play the best public-access courses at one of the most popular golf destinations in the U.S.? We’ve got you – and Myrtle Beach – covered. Using the Golfweek’s Best rankings of public-access courses in South Carolina, we are featuring the layouts within an hour’s drive of the Grand Strand.

For this exercise, we used Google Maps and punched in each course as of a Saturday morning to determine drive times, with Myrtle Beach International Airport as an achored starting point. Included with this list is a general map of where to find all these courses. Each one on the list below is represented with a number on the map – keep scrolling to see the numbers. The numbers represent the order in which the courses are ranked.

Included with each course is its position in South Carolina on the Golfweek’s Best public-access list. For any course that appears on our other popular rankings lists, those positions are included as well.

A little background: The hundreds of members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them on 10 criteria on a points basis of 1 through 10. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings are averaged to produce all our Golfweek’s Best course rankings.

The courses on this list allow public access in some fashion, be it standard daily green fees, through a resort, by staying at an affiliated hotel or purchasing a golf vacation package. If there’s a will, there’s a tee time – no membership required.

Myrtle beach map
(Google Earth and Golfweek)

Loyola Marymount wins Golfweek Fall Challenge with a birdie fest and a history lesson

Loyola Marymount head coach Jason D’Amore went into the record books in an effort to motivate his players by numbers, not finish.

Jason D’Amore is a stats and numbers guy. Still, few rounds send him to the record books for motivation.

After his Loyola Marymount team went 17 under in the opening round of the Golfweek Fall Challenge at True Blue Golf Club on Pawleys Island, South Carolina, D’Amore decided to do a little digging. Knowing it’s sometimes hard to follow up a really good round, D’Amore decided to search for team and individual records to change the narrative.

“I just threw some numbers at them and had them more along the lines of hey, let’s go break some records and shoot these numbers versus being in first or second or third place,” D’Amore said. “We can’t control what the other teams are going to do but we know what we’re capable of. We set some goals for ourselves each day that were more based upon us than anyone else.”

The shift worked, as Loyola Marymount played the following 36 holes in 30 under and won the team title by a shot over Washington State on Sept. 12. The Lions landed three players inside the top 7 while individual medalist honors went to Washington State’s Pono Yanagi and Arkansas State’s Thomas Schmidt, who both finished at 17 under.

Scoring: Golfweek Fall Challenge

College golf may be an individual sport, but D’Amore knows that, for better or worse, players feed off each other. At True Blue, the Lions kept the goal-setting focused on themselves, letting the chips fall around them.

In the history of the Golfweek Fall Challenge, only four teams have gone below 30 under for 54 holes at True Blue. Campbell set the scoring record of 48 under when it won in 2018 and won by 34 over second-place Jacksonville State & Stephen F. Austin. The individual record remains with Jacksonville State alum Tomas Anderson, whose 19-under total in 2014 included a final-round 60.

How does a team go 47 under? D’Amore makes a case for consistency more than fireworks. Loyola Marymount counted at least three scores in the 60s in each round and never counted anything higher than 72. Inviting conditions also played a role, he noted.

“The greens were soft, the ball was going far, there wasn’t a lot of wind,” D’Amore said. “It was just kind of one of those perfect recipes where you got some guys that could play some good golf and the golf course really just didn’t have a ton of defense because of the conditions.”

Loyola Marymount was two shots off the lead entering the final round and was paired with Washington State and Western Carolina on the last day. All three teams fed off each other with birdies flying.

As his team approached the final four holes, D’Amore texted his assistant coach Michael McCabe that he thought his team would need to reach 55 under to come out ahead of Washington State.

The closing gauntlet backed everyone up.

“Once we got to 16, 17, 18 it was a lot of playing telephone and trying to figure out where we were,” D’Amore said.

D’Amore and McCabe tried to gather as much intel as they could in the final holes and help their players make the best decisions possible. In the end, they edged Washington State by one shot. D’Amore was proud of the way his players remained in the present to finish the job.

A win in the first tournament out has the effect of creating a platform on which a team can build the rest of the season. The Lions last won a team title in the spring of 2021, when they won two tournaments back-to-back.

“One of the guys said something about, this makes the 5:30 a.m. wakeup calls for workouts worth it,” D’Amore said. “My response was it does, but it also makes you excited for the next 5:30 a.m. workout because you know that those days are what leads to winning a championship and having a chance to win.”

When you’ve got this kind of momentum, D’Amore notes, you don’t want much time off. Loyola Marymount was headed back home to Los Angeles after the True Blue title only to head north to San Francisco in another four days to play the USF/Howard Intercollegiate at TPC Harding Park.

“If we didn’t play great this week,” he said, “we’d be hoping we had awhile but since we played well, it will be nice to get going again.”

No rest for the winners.

[lawrence-auto-related count=1 tag=1438]

Robbie Fields steps in as Jacksonville State holds off trending Wright State to win 2022 Golfweek Fall Challenge

It’s Jacksonville State’s first team title since the Bash at the Beach 18 months ago.

A picture still lives on Robbie Fields’ phone in which Fields, the head women’s golf coach and acting men’s coach at Jacksonville State University, stands behind a middle-school version of one of his current men’s players. The 26-year-old coach was a senior on the Hartselle (Alabama) High School golf team when senior Ross Napier was an eighth grader. The top of Napier’s head didn’t even reach Fields’ chin back then.

Needless to say, Fields is familiar with Napier’s game (and his family in general – Napier’s mother was Fields’ AP Environmental Science teacher). It seemed pretty poetic that Tuesday, in the final round of the 2022 Golfweek Fall Challenge at True Blue Golf Club in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Napier broke 70 for the first time as a collegian.

“He’s a guy who plays consistent golf, his short game is unbelievable and now he’s starting to strike the ball really well,” Fields noted.

For the most part, Fields was across the street at Caledonia Golf Club coaching the Gamecock women’s team (the men’s and women’s events run concurrently during the Golfweek Fall Challenge). He walked the par-5 ninth hole with Napier in the second round and watched Napier make double-bogey there.

“I told him I’d take the blame for messing him up,” Fields laughed.

It was a minor blip, though, because Jacksonville State won the event by two strokes over Wright State after reaching 28 under for 54 holes. Napier tied for seventh with teammate Eric Jansson when both finished the tournament at 7 under. Ultimately, Ryley Heath, a transfer from Calhoun Community College, dropped 30-foot birdie putts on Nos. 16 and 17 in the fall round to help the Gamecocks stay two shots about Wright State. Heath was T-3 individually at 11 under.

Coastal Carolina’s Trey Crenshaw won the individual title at 18 under, five shots better than Wright State’s Tyler Goecke.

Coastal Carolina's Trey Crenshaw
Coastal Carolina’s Trey Crenshaw holds the trophy after winning the individual title at the 2022 Golfweek Fall Challenge at True Blue Golf Club in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

There are old ties there for Fields, too. Heath also attended Hartselle High School, and Fields has known him since he was 8 years old. The clutch performance came as no surprise.

“It’s not that he was a surprise because he had a great summer, he’s playing some really great golf and it’s almost like he’s unphased,” Fields said. “I wouldn’t always tell somebody at that moment where we stood as a team … but he’s one where nothing really bothers him.”

Despite the familiar faces, Fields is very much in new territory. Three weeks into his new job as head women’s golf coach, he was promoted to acting men’s coach, replacing James Hobbs, a Gamecock institution. Now he’s juggling two rosters and 20 players. Patricio Freundt-Thurne, who graduated last season after four years playing for the now-retired Hobbs, stayed on as a men’s assistant and helped the Gamecocks navigate True Blue.

Asked what he expects his future holds at Jacksonville State, Fields says he is sticking with the women – despite the fact that the men’s team is advocating for him to remain in their orbit, too.

“The way that I want to do things and the attention that I want to show the players, it’s just not really easy to do with 20 players,” Fields said. “I’ve told them I’m happy to be helping them. The guys have made it really hard to not give them as much attention as I’m trying to give the girls because they’ve been so awesome. I told them I’m going to do everything I can for you now but I really want them to be able to have somebody to give them a lot of attention.”

Despite feeling as if his attention is split in too many directions, Fields can talk in-depth about every player in his lineup at True Blue. Jansson, he explains, they call The Machine for his day-in, day-out work ethic. Gabriel Restrepo, who finished T-25 individually and was the fourth counting Gamecock score, played through illness the first two rounds before breaking 70 on the final day.

“We’ve got seven guys at home that at any given day could step into the lineup and do the same thing we did this week,” he said. “That kind of competition is good for the team. The lineup, because I’m not with them as much for their qualifying, the lineup is pretty much going to be based on scores and qualifying. The lineup is probably going to be pretty different throughout the year just because there’s so much competition. I think any given day they’re going to go out and compete.”

Before winning the Golfweek Fall Challenge, Jacksonville State hadn’t won a team title since the Bash at the Beach in March 2021. Runner-up Wright State couldn’t have a different story, however.

After winning their season opener at Ball State, their 10th team title in their last 14 starts, the Raiders came up two shots short at True Blue. Wright State led the field in birdies but ultimately, head coach Conner Lash said, the tournament came down to True Blue’s closing gauntlet. The Raiders made too many big numbers on 16, 17 and 18.

It can be tough to battle big expectations, Lash said, but the team is pretty good at taking things one shot at a time.

“You take the positives from the year before, we had a lot of success and I think we had a lot of confidence coming into this year and the guys were playing good golf over the summer so I think we just kind of rode the momentum and the confidence,” he said. “We won last week, got second this week so there’s still a lot of positives, lot of momentum we can take.”

[listicle id=778294911]

[mm-video type=playlist id=01es6rjnsp3c84zkm6 player_id=01evcfxp4q8949fs1e image=https://golfweek.usatoday.com/wp-content/plugins/mm-video/images/playlist-icon.png]