By Rob Wakeling
Associate Head Coach
We are very excited about the recruiting class we just signed with Chase Johnson, Ian Holt and J.D. Hughes.
They are all big guys at 6-foot-2, 6-3 and 6-6. College golf has turned into a power game for the most part. The courses we played in the fall were 7,100-to-7,500 yards.” Those are hard to play. It’s tough for a player who hits it 260-to-275 yards to compete on those courses. You are always mesmerized by power, and when you see Chase, Ian and J.D. hit the ball, it goes a long way. They are very powerful players. Those three guys also have great short games, but the first thing you notice is the power.
If you look at our current players and guys like Taylor Pendrith, when you hit it as far as he does there really are no courses that are not good for you. I don’t think the shorter, fairway hitter is being phased out, but there are going to be certain courses where they will really struggle compared to longer hitters. Even if it is a tight course, some of these guys can hit their 1-iron or 2-iron 270 yards. On a tight golf course, they tone down to those and can still play it.
When you are recruiting guys who are 6-4, 6-5 and 6-6 now, you wonder what the college golfer is going to look like in 20 years. Are we going to have 7-footers playing golf? Probably. Golf keeps going that way. We are almost running out of land for some golf courses, and there are already some 8,000 golf courses out there.
Its finals week here in Kent. Taylor and Corey Conners just got back from a four-day training trip with Team Canada in Phoenix. When they came back, they checked in with us to show what they are working on. They will both probably go play the Jones Cup in early January.
At this point, all of the guys are working on their bodies and not really practicing too much. I think our guys like kind of getting away from it a little bit and laying the clubs down. But they are really working with our strength coach Bob Lemieux. He does a TPI screening and sees where they have come from September through now. Some of our guys have weaker hips, some have weak cores, some have weak shoulders.
Bob does a great job of saying that we have 90 days to work on those weaknesses and this is what each of you need to do before our next tournament.
Bob is a huge part of our success. I look back to Mackenzie Hughes a few years ago, and he is a guy who had some body deficiencies that didn’t allow him to swing the club the way he does now. I know Bob was instrumental in giving him some ideas and some exercises to specifically work on those deficiencies. They must have worked because Mackenzie is on the Web.com Tour now.
I’ve seen lots of instances where what Bob does with our guys has had a huge impact. Corey Conners is another example. When he first got to Kent State his ball speed was 148. Now it is 168. That 20 miles per hour on a golf ball equals about 25-to-30 yards. So, what Bob does with the programs he puts our guys on is a big part of our success.
We’ve been having a lot of fun watching our alums on the professional tours in the last few months.
Ryan Yip played well in the Australian Open. John Hahn made his first cut on the European Tour and finished 47th at the Hong Kong Open (70-68-73-68–279, 1-under). Now we’ll have Mackenzie out there on the Web.com Tour. Stuff like that really snowballs when you think of how we’ll have three seniors going out there soon trying to play golf for a living.
It’s a testament to the program Herb Page has here at Kent State, the things he has in place, the players he recruits and how he helps them get better over the course of four years here.
Let’s be honest, the more times Kent State is mentioned on television with our guys out there on the tours, maybe it helps you get that one recruit who wonders, hey, what’s going on at Kent State? They have three or four guys. We get so much great publicity from Ben Curtis, but when you have three, four, five guys out there playing, it really does create a snowball effect.
It’s exciting, and it causes us to hit refresh a lot on our phones to keep up with the leaderboards and see how our guys are doing on the tours.
