Men’s Golf Returns to Action in North Carolina on Monday

HANOVER, N.H. — The Dartmouth men's golf team will play its first round of golf as a team in almost 19 months when the Big Green tee up at the River Run Invitational hosted by Davidson College in North Carolina on Monday and Tuesday next week.

It has been a long, strange trip to get to this point, but Rich Parker, the Bill Johnson Head Coach of Men's Golf in his 17th year, is looking forward to leading his team on the links once again, though he will be without some of his players at the start of the fall.

"We've had some key injuries this fall, but we will push through it," Parker said. "We will work our way back sooner than later, however. I've always used the fall to give each player a chance to play in a college event and get that feeling of competing and the opportunity to see where they stack up. We have a couple of talented freshmen, and I expect us to get better as we go with our players getting healthy in the coming month."

Leading the team for one more season is three-year captain Jason Liu, playing as a graduate student thanks to the one-year embargo that prohibits graduates from competing in intercollegiate athletics at Ivy League institutions. A second-team All-Ivy League performer in 2019 and the conference Rookie of the Year in 2018, Liu brings a stellar career stroke average of 74.1 over 60 rounds to the links. In the pandemic shortened 2019-20 campaign, he was on his way to another all-conference honor with the best stroke average of his career (73.7).

Others teeing off at River Run will be senior Charles Petrie, junior Eli Thrasher, sophomore Alex Gu and freshman Eli Kimche. Petrie was playing well as a sophomore with the team's third-best stroke average when the season came to halt. He also had the Big Green's low score at the final event to start the spring when the pandemic hit.

Thrasher played in two tournaments as a freshman, but that is the only collegiate competition the other three entrants have between them. But Thrasher was a two-time Virginia 6A State champion in high school, and Gu has a long resume of success in high school in Connecticut, winning the CIAC High School Open Championship as a junior and following that up by winning the Connecticut Junior PGA Championship at Yale Golf Course two weeks later. Kimche, meanwhile, was the regional champion as a senior in 2019-20 and led his team to a third-place finish at the Utah 5A State Championship in a year Park City bumped up a classification after winning 11 straight 4A state titles.

Parker also has five others on his roster, including the Turner brothers, fifth-year senior James and senior Mark, both of whom are nursing injuries. And with junior Jason Chen and two more freshmen in Charlie Baker and Justin Lee, Parker will have the opportunity to get everyone some action with four tournaments on the schedule this fall.

Schedules