Tuesday, May 21, 1996
Worst round on last day sinks hopes for berth at nationalsBy
Arthur Choung
Daily Bruin Contributor
For the UCLA men’s golf team, the outcome was unexpected, yet
predictable.
UCLA completed the final plunge of a roller-coaster season by
finishing 12th overall at the NCAA regionals, missing out on
nationals for the third straight year.
Needing to place in the top-half of an 18-team field, the
ninth-seeded Bruins began the tournament with a solid first round,
good enough for a fifth-place tie.
The Bruins struggled the second day, finishing four strokes
behind their previous round and falling into a seventh-place
tie.
Still in position to qualify for nationals, UCLA shot the worst
final round of all competitors, 12 strokes off its first round
pace.
"We really didn’t even have to play that well," UCLA co-captain
Mike Miller said. "We picked a bad time to have a real bad
round"
Host Stanford captured the tournament title behind Tiger Woods’
eight-under-par performance, six strokes better than the nearest
competitor. Arizona State, coming off a first-place finish at the
Pac-10 Championships, tied for second with UNLV, one stroke behind
Stanford. Pepperdine and USC rounded out the top five.
For the Bruins, this tournament was a microcosm of the entire
season. While the team had its sights set on competing at NCAAs,
inconsistency proved to be their downfall.
Miller shot one-under par and UCLA co-captain Eric Lohman shot
par in the first round, placing them third and eighth overall after
day one. Neither of them could match their original performance, as
Lohman shot 9-over par in the final two rounds, finishing 33rd
overall. Miller shot 12-over in the final rounds, giving him a
43rd-place finish.
"I’d say it was my biggest disappointment in college, never to
play at nationals," said Miller, who along with Lohman, played his
final tournament for UCLA. "My last major goal was to play at a
nationals."
All season long, the Bruins showed flashes of what they could
do, but they simply could not sustain that level of play.
Three Bruins  Lohman, Miller and B.J. Schlagenhauf Â
finished in the top 10 more than once during the season while the
other two  Darren Humphrey and Brandon DiTullio  were
in and out of the lineup all season long, each playing in about
half of the team’s tournaments.
None of them were able to string together two consecutive top-10
performances, however. Miller was the closest, finishing 11th and
eighth in the second and third tournaments of the year. For the
Bruins, a top-10 finish usually meant an average or poor
performance in the following tournament.
In their nine tournaments following a top-10 finish, Miller,
Lohman and Schlagenhauf averaged a 41st-place finish. The best
effort was Lohman’s 21st-place finish following a tenth-place
finish early in the season. Still, UCLA head coach Brad Sherfy was
not disappointed in his first year at the helm.
"All in all, we had a pretty good year," Sherfy said. "The kids
gave me everything they had. They played all the way out to the
end.
"Hopefully, the guys that we had this year get a little bit
better. With a lot of hard work, we can get to the next level."