It was a big moment for Georgia Tech golfer Hiroshi Tai on Monday night.
Tye shot a 1-under 71 on Monday to become the Yellow Jackets’ fourth national collegiate champion, and the Yellow Jackets finished with a team score of 4-over 292 to advance to the match play division of the NCAA Division I Men’s Golf Championship for the second consecutive year.
Georgia Tech will decide the national champion in 2024.
This will be Tech’s sixth appearance in the Match Play since the NCAA instituted the format in 2009, but this time it will be in the most unexpected way possible, with the Yellow Jackets losing All-American Christo Lamprecht to a back injury after the opening round. The Jackets will face top-seeded Illinois, which won the team event by 16 strokes, at 9:50 a.m. ET on Tuesday.
Tye, who was leading by two strokes at 6-under for the tournament, nearly dashed his and his team’s hopes when he hit his tee shot into a greenside bunker for a triple bogey on the penultimate hole of the round, the par-3 eighth, which dropped him to 3-under, one stroke behind individually, and dropped the Yellow Jackets from the top eight on the leaderboard.
Tye went up-and-down on the final hole for par, and his teammates ahead of him made similar par-saving shots on the final two holes to keep the Jackets alive. Freshman Carson Kim (Yorba Linda, Calif.) chipped in for birdie on the eighth hole, the same hole that Tye made three strokes on, while senior Bartley Forrester (Gainesville, Ga.) and freshman Aidan Tran (Fresno, Calif.) also went up-and-down from off the green to avoid danger on the final hole.
“(Winning the title) means a lot to me,” Tye said. “Everyone on my team has really helped me these last two and a half years, not just the six guys here but everyone back home. They’ve been some of the best friends I’ve had in my life and I’m really grateful for the relationships I’ve been able to build thanks to my coaches. [Bruce Heppler] And he brought me here.”
Tye joins Watts Gunn (1927), Charlie Yates (1934) and Troy Mattson (2002) as national collegiate champions from Georgia Tech.
The winner of the Tech-Illinois game will face the winner of the match between No. 4 seed North Carolina and No. 5 seed Florida State in the semifinals. On the other side of the bracket, No. 2 seed Vanderbilt will face No. 7 seed Ohio State and No. 3 seed Virginia will face No. 6 seed Auburn. Both games will start at 10:40 a.m. EDT, with the winners meeting in the other semifinal in the afternoon. The semifinal will start at 3:45 p.m. EDT.
Golf Channel will broadcast live coverage of the quarterfinals beginning at 1:00 PM EDT and the semifinals beginning at 6:00 PM EDT.
(All statistics and information courtesy of Georgia Tech Athletics)
