Marquette's men's golf program arrived at Riverton Pointe Golf and Country Club in Hardeeville, S.C., holding a two-stroke advantage with one round left in the Big East Conference Men's Golf Championships. They didn't squander it, exactly. Xavier simply made the final 18 holes look like an entirely different event. Freshman Cayse Morgan fired a 64 - the kind of round that reshapes leaderboards and memories alike - and the Musketeers stormed to a 13-under 275 on Monday, pulling clear on the back nine to finish the 54-hole affair at 21-under 843, four strokes clear of the field.
A Freshman Seizes the Moment
Morgan's card deserves a second look. He went out in 6-under 30 on the front nine - already alarming for Marquette, which had been tracking him in real time. What happened next was arguably worse for the Golden Eagles: MU played the back nine in even par while Xavier came home in 5-under, turning a contest into a runaway. Morgan's 68-70-64 sequence across three days produced a 14-under 202 total, earning him medalist honors. He's a freshman. Xavier came into the week ranked 94th in the NCAA Division I standings. None of that was supposed to matter - until it did.
The Musketeers' victory was their ninth conference title overall and their first since 2005. That gap - two decades - gives the win a weight that goes beyond the bracket implications. Program identity, recruiting narrative, the slow accumulation of belief that a program is back: Xavier earned all of it on Monday afternoon in South Carolina.
Marquette's Position: Solid, But Uncertain
Here's the catch for Marquette. Ranked 67th nationally, the Golden Eagles closed at 17-under 847 and placed two golfers in the top 10 individually. Freshman Mischa Candinas of Switzerland - bogey-free in the final round - closed with a 68 and finished third. Senior Johan Widal of Sweden added a 71 for a T-9 result. That's real production from a young core, and Marquette's overall number is competitive enough to attract attention from the selection committee.
The question is whether it's competitive enough for an at-large bid to the 81-team NCAA Division I Regionals field. According to GOLF Channel analyst Brentley Romine's most recent projections, No. 68 Saint Mary's of California - which finished 11th at the West Coast Conference Championships - would be the last program in the field, with Washington State (ninth at the WCC) as the first team out. Marquette sits at 67th in those projections, which would technically put it inside the bubble. But conference championships reshuffle the picture considerably, and the at-large calculus won't settle until the full results are tabulated. The regional field and brackets will be announced Wednesday at 1 p.m. on GOLF Channel.
DePaul, for its part, shot 7-over in the final round and slid to fifth place - a rough finish after entering the final day in contention.
Wisconsin's Week, and a Broader Midwest Golf Notebook
The University of Wisconsin had a harder time of it at the Big Ten Championships, which wrapped Sunday on the Witch Hollow Course at Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club in North Plains, Ore. The Badgers finished in a tie for 16th - 47 strokes behind UCLA, which won the title at 8-under 832. Senior Spencer Turtz of Charlotte, N.C., led Wisconsin with rounds of 73-71-71 and a T-29 individual finish. That's a 39-over 879 total for the program, which tells its own story.
On a more encouraging note, UW-Green Bay placed two golfers on the All-Horizon League First Team. Sophomore Mason Haupt of De Pere earned the men's nod after finishing third at the Horizon League Championships at Mission Inn Resort in Howey-in-the-Hills, Fla., leading the Phoenix to third place in the standings. Junior Riley Pechinski of Stevens Point earned the women's honor - she won the Western Illinois Intercollegiate on April 3 and finished second at the Motor City Matchup last fall. The UWGB women finished fifth at their conference event.
Wisconsin Golf Notes: A Legacy Figure, and a Small-Town Course Finds New Stewards
John Aehl, the 1982 WSGA Governors Cup champion and a six-time Nakoma Golf Club champion, died April 18 at age 90. He spent four decades at the Wisconsin State Journal - first as night city editor, then as a sports reporter covering the Green Bay Packers and, intermittently, competitive amateur golf. The two careers fit together more neatly than they might sound: the night shift freed his days, and Nakoma became his second office. He later served for years on the Wisconsin Golf Hall of Fame Selection Committee.
His 1981 Madison Men's City victory stands out in the record. A 72-hole event played across four courses - Yahara Hills East, Cherokee CC, Maple Bluff CC, and Blackhawk CC - it drew a field that included Wisconsin golf names Steve Caravello, Harry Simonson, and Pat Richter, as well as a young Sean Toulon, who would later become known as a putter designer, and more than a dozen future Wisconsin PGA club professionals. Aehl closed out the title on the par-3 18th at Blackhawk, coaxing a 55-foot birdie putt to within a foot for a tap-in par. His son Dan, a future Auburn University golfer who had missed the 36-hole cut, was on the bag. "I am a good golfer, but not a great golfer," Aehl said afterward. "On my level, this is a real accomplishment for me." That kind of honest self-assessment is rarer than it should be.
Elsewhere in Wisconsin, Charlie and Colleen DeSmidt have sold DeSmidt's GC in Crivitz - 37 years after buying what was then Hi-View GC, a nine-hole par-29 executive course, and building it into an 18-hole facility. The new par-36 back nine, designed by Charlie DeSmidt himself, opened in 2000. The buyers are Jim and April Schrubbe and Dave Boesch and Brittany Boehnlein. Small-town golf courses are among the quieter threads in the fabric of regional American life; their transfers of ownership rarely make headlines, but they mark something real. The DeSmidts' Facebook post on the sale said it plainly: "Somewhere along the way, something even more special happened - you became part of our lives, too."
