College golf landed at the exclusive Alotian Club in Roland, Arkansas, this week and Notre Dame stole the show. In a limited but stacked six-team field, Notre Dame opened a 20-shot margin after 54 holes of stroke play at the inaugural Jackson T. Stephens Cup then took down Arkansas in Wednesday’s title match.
Head coach John Handrigan called it a week that was four years in the making.
“It’s been four years of building this, to be honest,” he said. “All these guys have been through it and I’m just proud of what they’ve done over the years and how much they’ve improved over time. The program got better every single year since we’ve been a part of this trip together. Everything we’ve asked them to do, they’ve done it and that showed this week.”
The inaugural event debuted at the Alotian Club this week before it makes stops at equally exclusive Seminole Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, in 2022 and Trinity Forest in Dallas in 2023. The six-team field played 54 holes of stroke play before the top two teams – Notre Dame and Arkansas – squared off in a televised match for the title on Wednesday.
Stephens Cup: Scores
The other four teams also played head-to-head matches, with Florida State and Arizona, who had tied for third, playing each other and Alabama and San Diego State, the Nos. 5 and 6 teams, squaring off. San Diego State and Arizona won those matches.
In the title match, Notre Dame claimed four of five points, starting with Taichi Kho at the top of the bracket taking on Segundo Oliva Pinto. Kho, who was third in stroke play at 5 under, won, 1 up. Kho’s Irish teammate Davis Chatfield won by the biggest margin of the day, defeating Luke Long, 6 and 4.
Palmer Jackson, who tied for individual medalist honors, also won a point for Notre Dame with Andrew O’Leary claiming the fourth point.
Notre Dame entered the week ranked No. 17 in the Golfweek/Sagarin College Rankings. The Stephens Cup victory comes on the heels of a runner-up finish at the Fighting Irish Classic to start the month plus a tie for first at the Gopher Invitational and a third-place finish at the Windon Invitational in September.
A women’s competition ran concurrently at the Alotian Club, with LSU coming out on top of South Carolina in the title match. LSU also won four of five points in Wednesday’s match-play round, with only South Carolina’s Mathilde Claisse winning a match for the Gamecocks.
Most notable on the women’s side was the anchor match between Ingrid Lindblad and Hannah Darling, two top players in the women’s game. Lindblad came out with a 1-up victory.
“We have a really good team and today we proved we can play match play as well,” said Lindblad, who defeated teammate Carla Tejedo Mulet on Tuesday in a playoff to win the stroke-play title. “We know we can play stroke play but we don’t have as many match play events. This was a great opportunity for us to play some match play and win the match play as well.”
The Stephens Cup title fills a void for LSU that opened up last spring.
“The last time was in the SEC Championship when it went to match play so we got a little bit of practice there,” head coach Garrett Runion told the Golf Channel. “Unfortunately, in the NCAAs we missed match play by one shot. They weren’t too happy about that. They were motivated over the summer and this was great practice for the SEC Championship and hopefully the national championship.”
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