‘We’ve come a long ways’: After 2 NCAA championship appearances in 3 years, Utah’s golf program is gaining respect

Before Garrett Clegg became the head coach of the Utah men’s golf team, the Utes had been to the NCAA championships six times in program history, with the last appearance coming in 1988.

When Clegg — a Utah alum who was a two-time All-Mountain West Conference golfer — was hired following longtime coach Randall McCracken’s retirement in 2016, he knew there was a long journey ahead of him.

Utah had finished in 12th place in all of its first four seasons in the Pac-12 under McCracken, and that trend continued in Clegg’s first two seasons.

But he was starting to build the program, slowly but surely, getting his recruits and changing the trajectory of the team. Clegg used the opportunity to grow a program as part of his recruiting pitch, and it resonated with athletes.

“We’ve been a program that’s been building and gaining momentum and excelling and overachieving, and so we’ve really tried to get kids that want to be a part of creating, want to be a part of building, to be the underdog,” Clegg said.

Once Clegg convinced recruits to take an in-person visit to Salt Lake City, which he called one of the “best cities in the world,” and tour the campus, it sells the program even more.

“The biggest deal is getting kids on campus, getting them to see what we have, getting them to feel and understand what our program’s like and the family atmosphere that we have and the support within our community, and once they’ve recognized all those things, we get the right guys here,” Clegg said.

In 2022, those “right guys” included three international golfers who believed in Clegg’s vision — Javier Barcos (Spain), Martin Leon (Chile) and Tristan Mandur (Canada) — and two local products — Blake Tomlinson and Braxton Watts.

The Utes finished tied for eighth in the Pac-12 standings that year, but earned an invite to NCAA regionals, where they finished 4-under to advance to the NCAA championships for the first time since 1988. Tomlinson finished 5-under and Barcos was 3-under to lead the Utes.

At the NCAA championships, the Utes finished 27th out of 30 teams at Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Arizona.

After a bit of a setback last season after Tomlinson and Mandur graduated and with a team that didn’t quite gel, recruiting paid off for the Utes as Clegg brought in a couple of talented freshmen, including Sergio Jimenez from Spain and Gabriel Palacios from Guatemala.

Both players came up absolutely huge in this year’s Austin regional, especially on the final day of play as Palacios fired a 3-under and Jimenez shot even par to help the Utes finish in fourth place and punch their ticket to the NCAA championships.

Barcos led the charge for the Utes on the first day of the regional, while Watts and Brandon Robinson rounded out scoring for Utah.

“There’s a ton of pressure when you’re on that fifth spot, and I think the boys performed extremely well under the pressure, and so it was just a big confidence boost for them to start out the day on the inside of the cut line and to finish the day one spot higher, so I think they all gained some confidence and just a little stronger belief in who they are as a group,” Clegg said.

The venue of this year’s NCAA championships — Omni La Costa Resort in Carlsbad, California — carries a bit of mystique after undergoing a renovation, so none of the 30-team field will have played it before Thursday’s practice round.

That’s not unusual for college golf programs to play tournament at a new-to-them venue, only getting one practice round before play, so it’s business as usual for Clegg and the Utes.

The women’s NCAA championships were held at the venue prior to the men’s, so Clegg and his staff watched Golf Channel coverage of it and scouted everything during Thursday’s practice round.

“You play it, you discuss your strategies amongst the players on the team, you hope you’ve broke the golf course down properly,” Clegg said.

Because each course is unique and plays differently, you never know which golfer will mesh well with the course, but Clegg is confident in his lineup 1-5 heading into Friday’s opening round.

“Our boys, we’re playing good golf, we look good, we’re excited, we’re happy. Last week in Texas, one of our freshmen, Gabe Palacios, was our best performer. Some weeks it’s Javier, some weeks it’s Braxton, some weeks it’s Brandon,” Clegg said.

“I don’t know who’s going to play the very best this week, but I know they’re all chomping at the bit and ready to go, and the reason why we’ve been successful this year is because one through five, any of them can be the star.”

With two NCAA championship appearances in three seasons, the perception of Utah around the golf community is changing.

“We’ve come a long ways,” Clegg said. “We’ve come from a team that I don’t think very many programs had a whole lot of respect for. We were always 12th in the Pac-12 championships.

We were a pretty lowly ranked program, and I think now when we show up at tournaments, people expect us to play well. They respect our team, they respect our players. We show up to events to compete, to win, and we’re a good, solid golf program.”

Though the Utes have made serious strides as a program, they feel like they can ascend to new heights, starting this weekend in California.

“We got a lot of growth still ahead of us. We’re doing a lot of really good things, but I feel like over the years we’ve legitimized the University of Utah golf team and golf program as a national program,” Clegg said.

“And the more opportunities, the more times we get to the national championships, the more times we prove that we’re supposed to be here, the more people see us or the higher people see us in the world of college golf.”