Men’s golf wraps up first half of season

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The men’s golf team finished the first half of their split season last week and still hopes to win a tournament by the end of the full season.

“It’s been an interesting season,” said men’s golf coach Clark Rustand. “We have seven of the 10 players who are freshmen, so we have a really young team on the one half.” One junior and two seniors finish out the roster.

Perhaps because the majority of its members this year are freshmen, the team hasn’t done as well as they hoped. But coach Rustand says, “It kind of goes in peaks and valleys as they adjust.”

Although the freshman golfers haven’t done as well as they’ve wanted to, they’ve shown great strengths this semester. Clark Fredrickson, a freshman from Springville, “has played well as of late — we expect a lot out of him,” Rustand said.

Other freshman golfers that have stood out this season and look to be promising golfers in their future with UVU are Jeff Holmes, from Orem, and Nick Tarasiewicz, from Colorado Springs, Colorado. Holmes “has had the best scoring average out of the freshmen,” and Tarasiewick “has shown some great improvements from the beginning,” Rustand added.

Nick Nelson, a senior from Alpine, has been the dominating golfer this season. “Nick was the #1 golfer last year and has retained that title this year. He has been around the top 20 in most of the events we’ve played in this season and finished third in the last event,” Rustand said.

Since the first half of their split season is now over, they look forward to the spring, when their season takes off for 5 more tournaments. “We expected it to be rough in terms of scoring,” Rustand said. “We wanted more top 10s in this season, but we haven’t done that this semester. And we’d still like to win a tournament by the end of the year.”