The Bradley men’s golf team got off to an exceptional start this week, setting several program records in the season opener. The Braves traveled to Madison, IL, for the Derek Dolenc Invitational and tied for third place with a team score of 846, a significant improvement from last year’s 13th-place finish at the event hosted by Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
“I don’t think we could ask for a better start,” head coach Jeff Roche said.“There are things they need to clean up, but we need to take the positives from this as we move forward, because we’re gonna have different golf courses, different fields, things like that, that we’re gonna play in. So this is just a really good confidence booster to get us moving forward as we go.”
Junior Connor Hamm led the team, becoming Bradley’s first outright individual winner since 2018. He shot 64 in the first round, the lowest 18-hole single-round score in team history. His final score in the tournament was 200, a program record for 54 holes. He was named Missouri Valley Conference Men’s Golfer of the Week.
“It was a goal of mine this year to win. I was happy to get it done in the first event,” Hamm said. “I was really happy with how the team played as well. I thought that we played really solid all around.”
“If we clean up the backend, I think we could have something pretty special,” Hamm added. “Obviously, we didn’t quite get it done, but that’s another goal for our team this year: to get a win. So I think that’d be really cool if we cleaned up and just take care of business.”
Sophomores Brody McCarthy and Carter Stevenson tied for sixth place in the tournament, each shooting 5-under-par in the three-round tournament. The invitational was McCarthy’s highest finish of his career and Stevenson’s second time placing sixth.
“Carter had set a pretty good standard last year, top 10s in his last three events, so he kind of just picked up where he left off,” Roche said. “As far as Brody goes, he’s got the smoothest, most powerful swing that we have on the team. He made it look really easy.”
The Braves will be in action Sept.16-17 when they travel to Colbert Hills in Manhattan, KS for the Wildcat Invitational at Kansas State.
“Preparation is something that is really key to my game, something that I think gives me a pretty good advantage is preparing for the golf course and conditions,” Hamm said. “I like to do a lot of prep work that involves using Google Maps and Google Earth: measuring golf courses, looking at the weather and the wind. The practice round helps a lot too; it’s all really important.”
“I think that’s a good summary of what we do,” Roche said. “We spend a lot of time trying to get everybody to look ahead, look at the golf course and be ready when we get there. This next one is going to be a lot longer course, and there’s going to be a lot more terrain and some differing bunkers, even purple bunkers. You have to know and be able to adapt mentally.”
