It was a great week for the Georgia Tech golf team.
On Monday, Hiroshi Tai won the NCAA Golf Championship and today the Yellow Jackets defeated No. 1 ranked Illinois to advance to the NCAA semifinals. Georgia Tech will play Florida State tomorrow in the semifinals. Georgia Tech advanced to the semifinals with wins over Bartley Forrester, Aidan Tran and Hiroshi Tai on Tuesday morning.
The Fighting Illini, who won the stroke-play team title by 16 strokes after 72 holes, continued to do well early in Tuesday's action, leading four of the opening five matches and three at the turn, but Tech slowly began to close the gap.
Forrester brought in the Yellow Jackets' first point, beating Tyler Goecke 3&1 in the lead match after trailing after two holes. He birdied the par-3 eighth hole to take a one-hole lead. The match went back and forth, but the Tech senior from Gainesville, Georgia, won three straight holes with pars on the 15th, 16th and 17th holes, improving his NCAA Match Play record to 4-0.
Tran replaced All-American Christo Lamprecht for the final 54 holes of Tech's batting order and led the Yellow Jackets to a 3&2 win over Piersen Hunt on Tuesday. The sophomore from Fresno, California, never trailed in the penultimate match and took the lead with a birdie on the eighth hole. He extended his lead through three holes before beating Hunt on the par-1.5 16th hole.
It was NCAA individual champion Ty that sealed Tech's victory in the anchor match. The sophomore from Singapore came from behind with a birdie on the 10th to tie the match. He won consecutive holes, all par-4s, the 12th, 13th and 14th, to take a three-stroke lead and closed out the match on the 16th when his tee shot hit the flag and fell within three feet of the cup.
“I'm proud of our players,” head coach Bruce Heppler said. “We played (well) on the back nine. We played really well on the front nine and (Illinois) had us behind with some birdies, but we played better on the back nine, especially the 12th hole (a par-3). We won three or four holes there and got back on track. We hit some great shots in the first half. Hiroshi's iron play was phenomenal and Aidan Tran played great as well.”
In the other two matches, freshman Carson Kim of Yorba Linda, California, lost to Max Herendeen, 5 & 4. Freshman Cale Fontenot of Lafayette, Louisiana, nearly made up a four-hole deficit after 18 holes to play to get within one, but the tie ended in a deciding point that left the match undecided.
Meanwhile, No. 6 seed Auburn beat No. 3 seed Virginia 3-1 to advance to the semifinals to face No. 7 Ohio State, which beat No. 2 Vanderbilt 3-1. For the first time in the NCAA Championship, all four lower-seeded teams won on Tuesday morning.
Notes – Tech is 4-5 overall in six appearances in the NCAA Match Play, reaching the quarterfinals in three of those appearances…Bartley Forrester won all three matches at the 2023 NCAA Championship to improve his individual record to 4-0…Hiroshi Tai improved his match play career record to 2-2…Tech lost 3-0 to Florida State in the ACC Championship semifinals in April and is 1-1 overall against the Seminoles in postseason match play.
(All statistics and information courtesy of Georgia Tech Athletics)
