Two weeks, two tournaments, and two vastly different results for the Pima College men’s golf team has head coach Clark Rustand scratching his head.
Are his Aztecs the world-beaters, or at least field-beaters, of the season’s opening weekend, when they won the Chandler-Gilbert Invitational with a 5-under-par 563, with David Rauer seizing individual medalist honors after a 5-under 137?
Are they the team that slogged out of the gate on Monday with a plus-14 302 en route to a disappointing sixth-place finish in the Estrella Mountain Invitational?
“I’d like to say we lean more toward the first tournament, and that they were just learning how to deal with victory,” Rustand said. “But it’s still a little bit up in the air.”
The Aztecs did plenty of winning last season, taking home the regional championship.
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After 2016’s hot start, a bit of an inflated ego is understandable, but Rustand appreciated the lesson in humility that the team got this week.
“I’m really happy with the way we started, and this last week I think was more an issue of them learning how to be the ones to beat,” he said. “We talk about UA basketball, and one of the toughest things is that everyone gets up for them. It’s the same type of thing. We won the first tourney, and everyone was coming after us.”
Rustand talked to the Star about the team’s early season showing:
Is winning the first tournament of the season a good thing? In college golf, do you try to peak early and then sustain that level, or is it a slow burn that continues through the season and into the postseason?
A: “We do fall practices leading up to spring, and so as a coach, I try to do all my teaching and have the players work on their games so that they’re in peak shape coming into the first tournament of the year. In golf, you want to ride it as much as possible from the get-go. The way we qualify for nationals is scoring average versus other teams in division. If you have good rounds to start, it puts you in a better position to ride the momentum through the season.”
You have several sophomores returning from a successful team from last season. Does that matter in junior college golf?
A: “Golf, and probably tennis, are the two toughest sports to put together a team. They’re completely individual sports. We’re not recruiting positions — they have to play every position. We have a sophomore-heavy team, but with junior college athletes, they’re still so early in their college careers that I don’t consider them veterans. For us to say we have a veteran team coming back, I still think they’re a very young team. David Rauer, this was his second tournament win, he’s been the leader by example, but then from last year we return three all-region kids. I think we have the talent.”
As a golf coach are you more working with them on their physical game or the mental side?
A: “I’m 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical. If they are struggling with something specifically, missing three-footers, I’ll go out on the putting green, and we’ll work on mechanics. But the flip side of that, for those types of issues, a lot of it is mental. One of things I really try to emphasize is I have one question I ask them, and I have one I want them to ask themselves: ‘What are we trying to accomplish? What am I trying to accomplish on this shot, this hole, this round?’ What you do is, if you’re trying to accomplish certain things, it’s when the execution is off that you have the real trouble.”
