Florida was eager to make a good impression in front of friends and family in its lone home tournament of the year at Mark Bostick Golf Course.
“You want to kind of show out the one time you’re able to,” junior J.D. Tomlinson said Wednesday.
But UF will have to wait until next season to make that impression.
The Gators placed 11th in the 14-team field at the two-day SunTrust Gator Invitational during the weekend — far from the first-place finish they were aiming for. They shot 881 (+41) as a team.
“I said (to the team), ‘This might be the darkest day of the season,’ in my opinion, in terms of place of finish relative to where we thought we might be able to finish this week,” coach Buddy Alexander said.
No. 25 Arkansas won the tournament team title, shooting a collective 849 (+9). Mercer’s Trey Rule took the individual medalist honor with a 206 (-4) score after competing in a playoff with Florida State’s Hank Lebioda.
Alexander was blunt when asked if he could take away any positives about the tournament.
“There was absolutely nothing positive about what happened this week,” he said. “When the same mistakes are being made over and over, then it becomes a habit, and it’s not so much a positive that you can look at and say, ‘Well, there’s some correctable mistakes.’”
Despite the overall poor performance, redshirt junior Santiago Gavino had his best outing of the season, shooting 215 (+5) — the best score out of the seven Gators who competed.
Unfortunately for UF, it did not count toward Florida’s team score, as Alexander picked Gavino to compete as an individual based on his qualifying performance.
Instead, Alexander chose senior Bill Anderson and redshirt freshman Conor Richardson, who have both played sparingly in their college careers, to be part of the five-man lineup. Anderson and Richardson finished tied for 66th place and tied for 73rd, respectively, in the 75-man field, shooting 230 (+20) and 234 (+24).
“I made the call,” Alexander said. “Nobody had a worse week as a player than I did as a coach. … I wouldn’t have done anything differently. I did what I thought was best and that’s what you always do.”
But Alexander is not so quick to accept his team’s poor performance on their home course. Florida’s best three players (who were included in the five-man lineup) in terms of finish — Eric Banks, Tomlinson and Ryan Orr — shot 10-over par on the last nine holes.
For Florida, it has been the same story throughout the season.
“Every tournament seems to be kind of like “Groundhog Day” in that we’ve done the same things,” Alexander said. “These guys have had success in their careers as individual players or they wouldn’t be here, so we’re going to find out what [the problem] is and we’re going to eradicate it.”
Count on a change of approach in the coming weeks for Florida men’s golf.
“I’m not giving up, and I don’t think (the players are) giving up,” Alexander said. “But we’re going to do some things differently, because what we’re doing is not working.
“We’re in danger of not making it to regionals unless we kind of get this thing turned around.”
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Santiago Gavino hits the ball during the SunTrust Gator Invitational on Saturday at the Mark Bostick Golf Course. Gavino totaled a score of 232 (+16) as an individual competitor at the Chris Schenkel Invitational last weekend.
