Dartmouth's top two golfers co-captain Peter Williamson '12 and James Pleat '13 finished in the top-20 of the 111-man field at the Plymouth Country Club, but the team ultimately fell behind when the third, fourth and fifth Big Green golfers could not complete the team score with two quality rounds, according to head coach Rich Parker.
"We did not play particularly well at this tournament," Williamson said. "We always try to do better on the second day of a tournament and improve in the standings, so this tournament was disappointing,"
The Big Green ended the tournament's first day in ninth place, led by Williamson's impressive 68-stroke (-2) first round. The team shot a 13th best 301 (+21) on the tournament's second day, allowing the University of Pennsylvania, Seton Hall University and Binghamton University to leap-frog over the Big Green on the leaderboard.
"There aren't a lot of moral victories in golf unless you're beating Harvard every week," Parker said. "There were a lot of strong teams there, and we finished in the middle of the pack. For us to do well at a tournament like that, we need to overachieve. We did that early this season when we finished second [at the Hartford Hawk Invitational]; we didn't last weekend."
Williamson and Pleat have been the team's top performers all season, but the other players have struggled to consistently complement them, according to Parker. At golf tournaments, team scores are calculated as the combined scores of each team's four best players. The Big Green players frequently combine to shoot three strong rounds each day at a tournament, but the team needs four strong rounds to have a shot at winning tournaments.
"We can get two or three scores in, but the fourth score hurts us," Williamson said. "Some days we can't get it in, and it hurts our total. We're looking to have the team getting low-70s scores, and we're getting mid-to-high 70s, and that's hurting us."
The Dartmouth golfers' next opportunity to find a fourth strong score comes next weekend at the New England Invitational Tournament from Oct. 15 to Oct. 17, the team's last competition of the fall season. The tournament is especially important to the Big Green, as all eight Ivy League teams will be competing the only tournament outside the Ivy League Championships where all teams will compete.
"We want to see how we can stack up against the other Ivies," Parker said. "If we can beat four of them, it would be a pretty good showing at this point. To win, we'd need to really come together and have five guys play excellent golf. We're still waiting for that moment."
Williamson said that the team has high hopes for the tournament.
"Given the teams competing [at the New England Invitational], we're trying to win this event," Williamson said. "Placing in the top two or three teams would be great, but beating all of the Ivy League teams is what we really want. If we can get two out of our third, fourth, and fifth golfers to get results, we definitely have a chance to win."
The team is still having qualifying rounds in practice to see which five golfers it will bring to the tournament.
"Everyone is playing to get in the team van. We bring the five kids with the best scores in qualifying, so it's very competitive in practice," Parker said.
