SoCon Men's Golf Championship page
SPARTANBURG, S.C. – The 2018 Southern Conference Men’s Golf Championship will be played Sunday through Tuesday at Pinehurst No. 9 in Pinehurst, North Carolina. This will be the fifth straight year the tournament is played at the par-72, 7,118-yard Jack Nicklaus Signature course.
This year’s event will be the 11th SoCon Championship played in Pinehurst. The event was also held in Pinehurst in 1937, 1939, 1948, 1969 and 1979-80, all on famed No. 2.
The league’s eight teams – ETSU, Furman, Mercer, UNCG, Samford, Chattanooga, Western Carolina and Wofford – will be competing for the SoCon tournament title and an automatic bid to the NCAA regionals. The individual medalist will also earn an automatic regional qualification if he is not on the winning team.
Three-time defending champion ETSU won its league-record 20th SoCon title in 2017, earning an eight-stroke victory over UNCG, which has finished runner-up to the Bucs in each of the last three years. ETSU’s Geuntae Kim and UNCG’s Jonathan Brightwell were tied atop the individual leaderboard after 54 holes last season, but Kim won a sudden-death playoff for medalist honors and became the Bucs’ second straight individual winner.
Both squads put three individuals in the top 10 last season and should be in contention again this year. ETSU returns two of those student-athletes in Kim and Trevor Hulbert, who finished third, a stroke back of Kim and Brightwell. The Spartans return all three, with Bryce Hendrix and Josh Stockwell, who tied for fifth, joining Brightwell in the 2018 lineup.
UNCG, which is seeking its first SoCon title, enters the tournament with the best team scoring average in the league this season at 292.53, but Furman (293.57) and ETSU (293.76) are right behind the Spartans.
ETSU is the top-ranked league team in the Golfstat rankings at No. 75, followed by UNCG (98) and Chattanooga (103).
Should the Bucs make it four titles in a row, they would be the first team to do so since ETSU from 1998-2001 and just the fifth in league history. Duke won a record eight straight from 1935-42 and ETSU claimed five consecutively from 1979-83. The Bucs also won four straight from 1989-92, part of a stretch of 11 crowns in 13 years.
In addition to the Bucs’ 20 titles, current league members Furman (13) and Chattanooga (six) have SoCon championships to their credit. Furman’s last was in 2010, while Chattanooga claimed consecutive titles in 2012 and 2013.
ETSU and Furman share the SoCon record with 14 individual medalists each. Among defending-champion Kim’s challengers this year will be Furman sophomore Keller Harper, who leads the league with a 72.17 stroke average, and ETSU freshman teammate Shiso Go, who is second in the SoCon with a 72.41 stroke average. Harper has posted four top-10 finishes in five spring events, while Go finished three strokes and 17 positions higher than Harper did at their only common tournament this season, the Bank of Tennessee Intercollegiate in October.
Seven players that finished in the top 10 at last year’s SoCon Championship are in the 2018 field. In addition to UNCG’s Brightwell, Hendrix and Stockwell and ETSU’s Kim and Hulbert, Chattanooga’s Etienne Brault (fourth) and Wofford’s Evan Grenus (tied for seventh) return.
The Southern Conference Men’s Golf Championship boasts a rich history. Dating back to 1933, the tournament has produced winners such as Wake Forest’s Arnold Palmer (1948 and 1949) and Furman’s Brad Faxon (1983), both SoCon Hall-of-Famers, and current PGA TOUR pros Stephan Jaeger of Chattanooga (2012), J.T. Poston of Western Carolina (2014 and 2015) and William McGirt of Wofford (2001).
The tournament tees off with twosomes at 8 a.m. Sunday. Live stats can be found here.
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