After his team took down a stout field Wednesday at The Prestige, Vanderbilt head coach Scott Limbaugh wanted his players to enjoy the victory before they headed straight to their next tournament, in Cabo, the following morning. They ordered pizza, listened to music, just hung out – oh, and cleaned what felt like pounds of sand from their belongings.
“I’m talking sand everywhere,” Limbaugh said.
Before the Commodores closed in a sparkling 14-under 270 to beat Oregon by 10 shots at PGA West’s Norman Course, they survived what were arguably biblical conditions during their second round. While the day started off normal with morning tee times off the back, by the time Vanderbilt reached the fourth hole, they could barely see or stand. A powerful sandstorm rolled through the Palm Springs area, with 40 mph winds sending blankets of desert sand whipping through the air.
“It was the darndest thing I’d ever seen,” Limbaugh said. “No. 4 is about 140-yard par-3, and you could hardly see the guys up there putting on the green. You could hardly see 5 feet in front of you.”
Vanderbilt had opened the event with what Limbaugh called the team’s best round of the year, a 3-over 287 in slightly less windy conditions. And the Commodores had remained steady until the final four holes on Tuesday, when they played Nos. 6-9 in a combined 20 over.
No Vanderbilt player carded better than Cole Sherwood’s 4-over 75, and the team slipped to sixth, five shots behind Texas Tech, which somehow shot 10 over playing alongside the Commodores.
“I’ve just never been through anything like that,” said Limbaugh, who is in his 18th year of coaching. “I didn’t know how to handle the guys after that round. The best round we’ve played all year long [on Monday], and 24 hours later it’s like the end of time, let’s jump off a cliff. I didn’t know what home base was at that moment. I knew that Texas Tech was the standard; they shoot 10 over par, we shoot 27 over par, so somewhere in between that was where I thought a decent round would’ve been. We just did some things and probably lost our way in some moments by not changing our expectations during the day.”
It would’ve been easy for Vanderbilt to complain about the luck of the draw – the 24-team field called for two waves, and teams in the afternoon wave on Tuesday had a nearly two-hour suspension in play because of the weather, which allowed them to finish a few holes in calmer conditions on Wednesday morning. (Of the top 10 finishers, only Vanderbilt (first), Texas Tech (fourth), Stanford (seventh) and SMU (T-9) were in Tuesday’s morning wave. Pepperdine, also part of the early groups, tied for 13th.)
But the Commodores brushed it off – literally. Reid Davenport fired a bogey-free 66 to finish solo third, four shots back of Texas Tech’s Ludvig Aberg, who shot 71-69-70 to win the individual title. Sherwood chipped in a 68 to place fourth and Gordon Sargent improved by 18 shots from the previous day, carding 65.
Even with easier conditions, Vanderbilt was one of just two teams to shoot under par on Wednesday.
“It’s great that we won, but the most important thing to me is what we learned because you never know, you could have a day like that down the road that means making match play or getting through a regional,” Limbaugh said. “People around there say they haven’t had a day like that in 25 years – well, I don’t know that; it’s my first time here. My point is, my message was: Don’t waste the failure, let’s talk about it, learn from it and maybe it’ll help us be better next time.
“I didn’t want to erase it, but I just said guys, we just gotta move on, and we did. A crazy week, and they went and got it done.”
Now, Vanderbilt, which is starting to gain momentum after a disappointing fall by program standards, heads south to face another loaded field at the Cabo Collegiate. Six top-10 teams – No. 2 Arizona State, No. 3 Oklahoma State, No. 6 Texas Tech, No. 7 Arkansas, No. 8 Stanford and No. 10 Tennessee – will join the Commodores, ranked 18th but likely to rise with the next Golfstat update.
Limbaugh, talking from an airport terminal in Phoenix on Thursday morning, was excited to get down there.
“We’ll probably go straight to the pool, check out the ocean, maybe play a little beach volleyball…,” Limbaugh said before this scribe interjected.
Haven’t you had enough sand?
“Well,” Limbaugh answered, “that’s a different kind of sand.”
Indeed, it was.
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