Entering the NCAA Championships, here’s how ‘scrappy’ freshman Jake Albert could be a difference-maker for Auburn men’s golf
Ask anyone in Auburn golf, and they'll come up with the same word to describe freshman Jake Albert. He doesn't have the longest drive, or the most experience, but here's why he could be key at NCAAs.
Jake Albert doesn’t have as long a drive as most his teammates on the Auburn men’s golf team.
As a freshman, he doesn’t have as much experience as many of his teammates, either.
But ask anyone in Auburn men’s golf to describe Albert, and there’s one word that keeps coming up:
“I would call his game pretty scrappy,” teammate Jackson Koivun said earlier this postseason, sitting at a table at Auburn’s practice facility.
Moments earlier, head coach Nick Clinard said Albert’s game was ‘scrappy’ too — before Koivun entered the room. Associate head coach Chris Williams also used the same word, independently, earlier this spring.
So what does that mean?
“It just means a guy that he knows how to score, knows how to play, a guy that believes in himself. … You know, even when he doesn’t have his best stuff, he’s still competing and he’s still trying to find a way,” Clinard said.
It can also mean, in postseason play, the difference between surviving and advancing, and going home.
Auburn begins stroke play at the NCAA Championships today in Carlsbad, Calif., contenders to win a second national championship in three seasons. After three rounds of stroke play, the field of 30 is cut to 15. After one more day of stroke play Monday, the field of 15 is cut to eight. Those eight teams enter the match play bracket.
And on each day of stroke play, five golfers compete with the top four scores counting.
That’s where being resilient, being adaptable — being, yes, ‘scrappy’ — can make all the difference, like it did for Auburn in the Athens Regional: In the first round, Albert shot a disappointing three-over par, which was the score Auburn dropped, but he bounced back to score three-under in the second round and two-under in the third round — and Auburn needed all of those strokes saved, as they ended up clearing the cut line by just four strokes.
Albert ended up carding Auburn’s worst single score of the tournament in that first round, but with that resiliency in his game, he bounced back to play a crucial role in punching Auburn’s ticket to Carlsbad.
‘Anybody, anywhere’
Talking to the man himself, Albert first describes his game in a different way: