UF Men’s Golf Team Set to Begin Its Quest to Repeat at Nationals

The Florida Gators men’s golf team heads into the Division I Men’s Golf Championship on Friday looking to do something that has never been done in program history: winning back-to-back national championships.

The Gators qualified for this year’s national tournament by placing third and shooting 4-under as a team in the NCAA Regionals in West Lafayette, Indiana, where only the top five teams of 13 advanced. It will be the Gators’ 57th all-time appearance in the national championships, which ranks fifth among NCAA programs.

Last season, the Gators’ national title was fueled by three PING All-Americans: Yuxin Lin, Ricky Castillo and Fred Biondi, who also won the individual national championship. It was the fifth team championship in program history and first under the NCAA’s match-play format.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿𝗱 🐊 pic.twitter.com/ywVWAUcgP3

— Gators Golf (@GatorsGolf) May 16, 2024

A New Team

All three golfers turned pro after UF’s championship, meaning this year’s team had to find a new formula for success.

“This team’s different,” UF coach J.C. Deacon said. “We just had three superstars last year and, at any point, you just knew one of those three guys was gonna do something big probably every day. This team is built different. We need everyone going at the same time.”

After a rough start to the season in the fall, the Gators went back to work to change the course of their season.

“We didn’t have a great fall but November, December and January, there was probably not a harder working team in the country than ours,” Deacon said.

The work paid off as Florida notched five wins in the spring half of the season.

The formula for this Gators team has been a mixture of experience from guys like fifth-year John DuBois, sophomore Matthew Kress and junior transfer Ian Gilligan, along with a few raw-but-talented guys like freshman Jack Turner and sophomore Parker Bell, who only played in four events in his first season at UF.

For DuBois, this will be his fourth trip to the national championships, and Kress was a part of the title-winning team last year as well. Gilligan, in his first year with the Gators after transferring from Long Beach State, is also an experienced collegiate golfer.

.@_johndubois_ 4️⃣th National Championship appearance on deck 💪

Last year at nationals 🔥

🔸 3-0 match play
🔹 T18 in stroke play
🔸 3 rounds of par or better #GoGators | #NCAAGolf pic.twitter.com/yUgHW1nLp0

— Gators Golf (@GatorsGolf) May 19, 2024

“[I’m] obviously really excited for the upcoming week,” said Gilligan, who earned second-team All-American honors at Long Beach State in 2023 before entering the transfer portal. “We have a great opportunity to repeat last year. I think if you guys had said do you think you guys have a chance to win a national championship [when UF playing was] at Olympia Fields [, Illinois in September], I probably would have said maybe not. But standing here, now, today I think we have a very good chance.”

The young guns of Turner and Bell have consistently found themselves nearing the top of the leaderboards this spring. Turner earned a T2 finish in the SEC Tournament in April, shooting 6-under over the course of three days.

For Bell, he also had a T2 finish in March at the Schenkel Invitational, shooting 10-under for the tournament. Earlier this week, Bell earned a spot in this year’s U.S. Open in a final-round qualifier in Dallas, where he shot 3-under in the 36-hole event qualifier, beating out guys like Sergio Garcia, Kevin Streelman and Abraham Ancer.

This duo was also the top two performers for the Gators in the NCAA Regionals. Bell shot 70-70-72 to finish T8, just three strokes behind medalist William Moll from Vanderbilt. Turner, meanwhile, recovered from an opening 76, bouncing back with rounds of 70 and 69 to finish T18.

“The last three or four weeks, we’ve relied heavily on Jack Turner, who’s a freshman, and Parker Bell, who’s essentially a freshman too,” Deacon said. “They’ve carried us, and that’s not normal.”

Looking For Repeat

The national championship has a new home from years past, now being played on a newly renovated Omni La Costa: North Course in Carlsbad, California.

The 30 teams that advanced to the championship round will play 54 holes in Carlsbad. After the first three days, the field will be cut to 15. Those teams will then play 18 more holes to try to earn one of eight spots in the match-play bracket.

This will be the first time any of the competing players and teams will have played and seen the newly renovated version of the course, eliminating any competitive advantage.

“I don’t think there will be any home-course advantage, which is nice,” Deacon said. “The University of Texas actually did a really nice thing. They are hosting, which makes no sense because it’s in San Diego, but they did that so nobody could play the golf course.”

Kress is a Saratoga, Calif., native and is poised and ready to go.

“This is exactly where we want to be, making another run, in my home state,” Kress said. “[I’ve] played La Costa a bunch of times, so I’m pretty excited. It’s a national championship. Yes, it’s hard, it’s gonna be tough, the best teams are there, but you don’t need to try to do anything crazy.”

The Gators will tee off at 4:17 p.m. ET Friday to begin their march to a potential sixth national title.