Men?s Golf Looks to Finish Season Strongly at Pac-10 Championships
EUGENE, Ore. ? The Oregon men’s golf team turns its focus to the Pacific-10 championships, which will be contested Monday through Wednesday at the 7,009-yard, par-71 Big Horn Country Club in Palm Desert, Calif. The winner of next week’s tournament will receive an automatic berth to the NCAA regionals.
"We’ve been good enough to compete with these teams for one or two rounds of a tournament this season, but we’ve also been inconsistent enough where one bad round has taken us out of contention," said Oregon coach Steve Nosler. "The most important thing now is for these guys to try to have some fun and finish the season on a high note."
The Ducks will be led by a pair of sophomores. Joey Benedetti, from Huntington Beach, Calif., paces the team with at 73.8 stroke average and has finished in the top 25 in three consecutive tournaments leading up to the Pac-10 event.
Derek Sipe, a native of Yorba Linda, Calif., is third on the squad with a 74.3 stoke average but has a pair of top-15 finishes in his last three tournaments.
Oregon will also compete seniors Gregg LaVoie and Chris Dukeminier and juniors Matt Ma and Dustin Pewarchuk in the unconventional six-play, top five scores-count format.
LaVoie, from Pasco, Wash., ranks second on the squad with a 74.0 scoring average, while Dukeminier, the Eugene native (Sheldon High School), is seventh at 75.7. After earning all-Pac-10 second team honors a year ago, Ma, from Aiea, Hawaii, has been inconsistent with a 75.6 average, while Pewarchuk (Victoria, B.C.) has been one of the Ducks’ better practice players, but has struggled to see that success carry over into tournaments with a 76.3 scoring average.
"I’m pretty happy with the group we’re taking because they seem pretty committed to finishing the season on a high note and I believe that they can," said Nosler. "We’re being realistic in that we probably need to win to advance to the NCAA regionals, but at the same time if we have a high finish and beat some ranked teams, who knows?"
There are three Pac-10 teams ranked in the latest Golfweek/Sagarin top 25, including No. 5 UCLA, No. 7 Arizona State and No. 20 USC. Arizona, Stanford and defending champion Washington are listed among the next 15 teams.
Individually, defending medalist Alejandro Canizares of Arizona State, who won the 2003 NCAA individual crown as a freshman, is not even the highest ranked individual in the field.
That honor goes to Stanford’s Rob Grube, who comes in at No. 8. Erik Flores of UCLA is 12th, with Canizares at No. 15 and Alex Prugh of Washington No. 25.
Other Pac-10 golfers in the top 50 include Daniel Im of UCLA (32), Niklas Lemke of Arizona State (34), Taylor Wood of USC (36), Chris Heintz of UCLA (40) and Benjamin Alvarado of Arizona State (42).
At last year’s Pac-10 championships played at Walla Walla, Wash., the Ducks finished fifth -- Oregon’s best finish in three years. The Ducks had four golfers finish in the top 20, including Ma, who tied for 14th, and LaVoie, who tied for 17th. Justin St. Clair tied for fifth to lead Oregon, while Jay Snyder tied for 20th.
Live scoring will be available for the 2006 Pac-10 championships at www.golfstat.com.
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