In a season filled with ups and downs, the men's golf team fell apart at the Philadelphia Big 5 Invitational last weekend in Plymouth Meeting, Pa. The squad carded a 36-hole 648 at the Plymouth Country Club, leaving it last in a field filled with 22 regional and Ivy League opponents.
"The big thing I take from last weekend was that it was embarrassing," said captain J.D. Ardell '13.
"We all got off to a bad start and picked a bad weekend to all play collectively poorly," wrote Head Coach Michael Hughes in an email to The Herald.
Hughes said his team overplayed the course and compounded mistakes. The performance was especially underwhelming coming off a successful showing at the team's last tournament, a ninth-place finish at the Hartford Hawk Invitational.
"I think we'll get better with time," Hughes wrote. "But the event in Philly was extremely disappointing by any standards."
The tournament's results did not bode well for the team's prospects against Ivy opponents. Cornell and Yale, the teams finishing closest to Brown, tied and outshot the Bears by 44 strokes.
"When we play well, it's contagious — and when we play poorly, it's contagious as well," Ardell said.
Ardell's score of 154 led the team, but even he acknowledged the need to perform better.
"It starts at the top and trickles down," Ardell said. "It's a domino effect."
Justin Miller '15 shot a 161, a small hitch in what has been an otherwise impressive fall campaign for the first-year. John Greb '15 finished the weekend with a 164, followed by Jack Mylott's '13 172 and Ryan Hoskins' '12.5 173.
The team finishes its fall campaign with the Northeast Invitational this weekend at Shelter Harbor Country Club in Westerly. The field will be composed of most of the Ivy League teams, and Ardell said the Bears' showing will dictate its morale going into the off-season.
"Last week was a wake-up call," Ardell said. "We want to perform well in our last tournament of the season — end on a good note."
