SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Virginia will be one of two teams moving onto match play for the first time. Florida will join the Cavaliers in bracket play here at Grayhawk Golf Club, host of the 2023 NCAA Division I Men’s Golf Championship.
The top eight teams after 72 holes of stroke play will now go head-to-head to decide the NCAA champion. Virginia is the No. 7 seed and will play No. 2 seed Florida in the opening round.
While Bowen Sargent’s squad is the lowest-ranked team of the eight teams at No. 17 in the Golfweek/Sagarin rankings, the Cavaliers are hardly a Cinderella story. Underdog, certainly, but any talk about them ‘just happy to be here’ or ‘a surprise team’ at this point can be thrown out the window.
Virginia can win it all.
Sargent took Virginia to Rich Harvest Farms and played with Oklahoma. He watched the Sooners win it all as the 14th ranked team in college golf.
“I told our team we played with Oklahoma at Rich Harvest they were ranked where we are and they won and then the next year it was Oregon,” Sargent said. “I told them you can win this thing.”
There have been five teams with a double-digit ranking that have won this championship in the 13 years of the match play format:
- 2009: Texas A&M (14th)
- 2015: LSU (11th)
- 2016: Oregon (22nd)
- 2017: Oklahoma (14th)
- 2019: Stanford (12th)
Watching his team this week play well enough to get a Tuesday morning tee time is not a surprise.
“I am very humble,” Sargent said. “I told our assistant we would make match play. I have a lot of pride and am happy for the program. We haven’t been that good the last four or five years and Ben (James) and Bryan (Lee) kind of changed that.”
A big reason for Virginia’s rise this year is freshman Ben James. Right out of the gate he won two of his first three college events and is the top freshman in college golf and a Haskins Award finalist.
“Ben brought a lot to this program,” Sargent said. “The way he approaches it day to day, the way he works that spread throughout our team.”
“As much as a coach wants to talk about it and enforce it, when you have guy like him that does it day to day the other guys see it and notice it and really changed the culture of our team. He is the reason it has changed.
James keeps everything in perspective.
“Means a lot to hear that from coach,” James said. “Golf is just a game at the end of the day I try to be the best person I can be and bring a positive mindset and hard working mentality and be…
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