Carter Stevenson on the green. Image courtesy of Bradley Athletics.
Bradley men’s golf took a trip down to the Missouri border, 10 minutes from St. Louis, for a beautiful two days of golf.
The Braves had an impressive performance on Monday and Tuesday, finishing tied for ninth out of 19 teams competing at SIU Edwardsville’s Dolenc Invitational.
The Gateway National Golf Links in Madison, just 20 minutes from the SIUE campus, has been a familiar course during head coach Jeff Roche’s tenure, marking the 10th time the Braves have competed there since his hiring.
“We were pretty optimistic,” Roche said. “We feel like we’ve got a good mix of players. The first couple tournaments, we haven’t quite met expectations, but they’ve done a lot of good work leading into it.”
Bradley started the tournament slowly, placing 13th after the first round with a team score of 292. Of the program’s five golfers at the event, none had an individual score over par after the first 18 holes.
“Knowing it was a tournament where we were going to have to shoot some really good scores to do well, it was a very positive vibe going in, [but] we got off to a slow start that first round,” Roche said.
The Braves found another gear on day two, finishing the final two rounds with a combined score of 556, including a program record-breaking 276 score in the third. This score is the program’s best round since 2017 at the Hoosier Invitational, where they scored 277.
Junior Carter Stevenson led the team again, tying for fourth place individually with a score of eight-under-par. The Marquette Heights native started with a par (71) in round one and ended his outing with 68 and 66, respectively, matching his career low of 205.
“Going into this tournament, I knew that I’ve done well in the past, so I was looking forward to it,” Stevenson said. “I was hoping that my body was going to hold up to the condition of playing 36 [holes]. But once I got on a roll, I just rode the high and did my thing.”
For the first time this season, two Bradley golfers finished in the top 20 in the same meet. Graduate student Weston Walker tied for 18th place after a make-or-break third round, where his score of 68, a new career-low for the hometown golfer, took him from even par to a three-under-par score.
“It was kind of a pretty average start, I would say,” Walker said. “I just couldn’t get the ball close enough to the hole; I was putting 20 to 30 feet from the hole for birdie every time, which I only made one putt in the first round. Other than that, the second round, I was firing at the pins. I started out with two doubles in the first four holes, and then I got five birdies and an eagle after that.”
Other results included freshman Joey Cerney finishing with a score of six-over-par, tying for 68th out of 100 golfers competing, junior Brody McCarthy taking 73rd with seven-over-par and freshman Brogan Smith placing 77th after scoring nine-over-par.
Overall, Bradley shot 848, only two strokes over their 2024 Dolenc Invitational score of 846. Coach Roche and the players mentioned many takeaways from this tournament, specifically.
“[For Weston] I know the first couple rounds, even though he was at an even par, he was a little frustrated with things,” Roche said. “And even with Carter, putts didn’t feel like they were dropping, but they just stayed the course and kept allowing opportunities to happen and they started taking advantage of them near the end.”
This was Stevenson’s third time competing on SIU Edwardsville territory, and his experience showed on the course.
“This is a course where if you have a lot of confidence going in, you’re probably going to play pretty well as long as your preparation has been up to that,” Stevenson said. “And I was just trying to get that across to the rest of the team, where there’s going to be some tight tee shots, but you shouldn’t necessarily be scared of them, and just go out there, pick a target and attack, and you should be alright.”
Walker was confident going into the third meet of his career and used that to work around his first two rounds and finish in the top 20.
“This was a tournament I was honestly trying to win because my swing felt that good going into it,” Walker said. “The first couple rounds were slow, but something clicked in the third round. I feel like the first nine holes of a tournament are holes that I need to get warmed up on, and I need to work on that first portion of the round and get loose beforehand and start to attack right out of the gate.”
Idaho was at the top of the team leaderboard, scoring 31-under-par (821). The Vandals’ Samuel Johnson and Weber State’s Matthew Wilson won the individual competition, both scoring 14-under-par after 54 holes.
Bradley men’s golf continues their fall season on Oct. 13-14 at Kennesaw State’s The Scrappy at Cobblestone in Acworth, Georgia.
