Home-course advantage? Hardly as TCU has disappointing tournament at Colonial
TCU golf coach Bill Montigel didn’t sugarcoat the Frogs’ performance at this year’s Nike Collegiate Invitational at Colonial Country Club.
TCU didn’t take advantage of local course knowledge and, outside of senior Stefano Mazzoli, struggled over three rounds. TCU finished tied for 12th in the 15-school tournament with a cumulative score of 30-over 870, 32 strokes behind winner Duke (2-under 838).
“The truth of the matter is we’ve played here so many times that I really expected us to play better than we did,” Montigel said. “I’m very disappointed. I’m very proud of Stefano. He played great and I feel like we’ve just got to get some other guys to perform at that level.
“We play here all the time and I saw things today that I never saw in any of our qualifiers. It just looked like we tried to force, we got behind the eight-ball and we tried to force it a little bit on a few holes that you can’t force it. You’ve got to be patient and hit kind of the fat part of the green. If we would’ve done that a little more, we would’ve been better.”
As stated, the good news coming out of the tournament is Mazzoli. He posted TCU’s only rounds of even-par or under-par, opening with an even-par 70 on Sunday, a 3-under 67 on Monday and a 1-over 71 on Tuesday.
Mazzoli finished tied for fifth in the tournament with a three-day total of 2-under 208. Duke’s Chandler Eaton won the tournament at 6-under 204, closing with 3-under 67 on Tuesday.
“I’m really happy,” Mazzoli said. “Obviously playing here at Colonial the senior year is something special, I’ll never forget. It’s nice to finish with a good [back nine]. I’m really happy with 2-under total.”
Mazzoli started the final round in an eight-way tie for the lead and birdied his first hole, the par-4 10th. But bogeys on Nos. 12 and 14 and a double-bogey No. 17 took him out of contention.
Mazzoli bounced back on his second nine with birdies on Nos. 1-2 and finished with seven straight pars.
The top-five individual finish is the best by a TCU player since the tournament started coming to Colonial every other year starting in 2014. But the school hasn’t fared well team-wise, finishing T13 out of 15 teams in 2016 and ninth out of 12 teams in 2014.
TCU’s second-best finisher this year was senior Triston Fisher, who tied for 38th at 9-over 219.
Next up for the TCU men’s golf team is the Big 12 Match Play Championship in Hockley from Oct. 12-14.
“Hopefully we learn from this [tournament],” Montigel said. “We’ve still got an incredible amount of golf ahead of us, so hopefully we can rebound from this.”
This story was originally published October 2, 2018 at 3:54 PM.