JEFFERSON CITY, Tenn. – Eyeing a fifth South Atlantic Conference Championship, No. 13 Carson-Newman heads down to Hickory, North Carolina for the 2023 SAC Men's Golf championships scheduled for Sunday through Tuesday.
During the 2022-23 season, the Eagles have compiled five top five finishes including a tournament victory at the Bobby Nichols Intercollegiate back on March 14th.
"We really struggled in the fall I thought," Carson-Newman head coach Randy Wylie said. "As the season's gone on, we have played better and better, which you like that scenario. We were in a bad spot as of the NCAA tournament early in the year, I think now we are in a pretty good spot, give a lot of credit to those young men working their tails off and playing really well this spring."
No. 13 Carson-Newman has had success at the conference championships, winning four times in program history. The most recent championship victories came in 2018 and 2019, when C-N became the first team to win the tournament in back-to-back years since Newberry in 2008 and 2009. Last season, C-N finished in fifth place and was one of five teams under par for the tournament.
C-N will be joined by four other SAC schools vying for a spot in the Southeast regional, where the Eagles sit in sixth. Those teams are No. 1 Anderson, No. 5 Lincoln Memorial, No. 9 Limestone and No. 10 Coker.
The 2023 SAC Championships will be held at Lake Hickory Country Club, in Hickory, North Carolina. The course plays just over 6,600 yards and is a par 72. The scenic and challenging course designed by Willard Byrd offers five par 4s, two par 3s and two par 5s on each set of nine holes.
"It's a shorter positioned course with a lot of doglegs," Wylie said. "We are working on fairway hitting off the tee, which should help lead us into mid to short irons into the par 4s. There is some reachable (par) 5s as well."
Teeing it up for the Eagles at the conference championships will be Hayden Hunneke (Chattanooga, Tenn.), Jake Mynatt (Knoxville, Tenn.), Luke Stock (Oxted, England), Elliot MacGregor (Shepperton, Middlesex) and Aidan Powter (Sydney, Australia.) Mynatt is the only Eagle competitor that has previously competed at the SAC Men's Golf Championships.
Hunneke made an immediate impact with C-N in his first season. The graduate student earned first-team all-conference honors thanks to a 71.4 scoring average during the 2022-23 season. That scoring average ranks third all-time in program history and is just 0.4 behind Jonathan Nielson's 71.0 scoring average in the 2021-22 season. Hunneke finished five of the eight events under par and in the top ten. According to GolfStat, he ranks 12th in the country among DII players, good for the third highest in the SAC.
Mynatt was right behind Hunneke all season. The fellow graduate student registered a 71.6 average mark in his 5th season, the best in his career. Mynatt recorded three top five finishes and six top twenty finishes during the season. His 16th ranking by GolfStat is fourth best among SAC competitors. The experienced Mynatt will compete at his fourth SAC Championship.
Stock was C-N's third lowest scoring average of the mark this year, at 72.5. His 2022-23 season consisted of three top 20 finishes and a low round of 67. The junior has shot under par in four straight opening rounds, three rounds of 3-under 69 and one 4-under 68.
MacGregor settled into the spring season quite nicely, scoring three rounds of par or better. His best finish of the season came in the first event of the year, a sixth-place finish at the Cougar Invitational. In 22 rounds, he averaged 74 strokes per round.
Powter will compete in just his fifth event of the year this week. The junior, in twelve rounds, has a 76.3 scoring average in his first year with C-N. His low round of the year came in the final round of the Saint Leo Invitational back on February 21st, a 3-under 70.
No. 13 Carson-Newman is paired up with players from No. 1 Anderson and No. 18 Lincoln Memorial. Those groupings tee off at 10:45 a.m., with the last group teeing it up at 11:21 a.m.
Live scoring is available at this link:
