Be sure to check out this month's interview with NMSU Associate AD Steve Macy. Steve filled in for Dr. Boston who is traveling extensively this month.
Today's look back at the Best Wins of '07/'08 brings us to the Aggie men's golf team's second WAC Championship in the past three seasons. The Aggies entered the WAC tournament on a hot streak and jumped out to an 11-stroke lead after the first day. Boise State staged a rally on day two cutting the Aggie lead to just three strokes. On the third and final day the Aggies were dealt a tough blow as Josh Stewart had to withdraw due to a wrist injury forcing the Aggies to play with just four players. The Aggies were able to hold onto the lead and won the championship by five shots.
Coach Lieberwirth shared his thoughts on the championship with us:
The first day we played, that was the best round we played all year, the first day of conference. It was only a couple under but Kevin [Lozares] shoots 69 and Josh [Stewart] shot 67 and on that golf course on that day was extremely good. The other guys held in there. After getting out to that big lead obviously you'd love to get a pad like that. You know it's not going to win us the tournament but getting off to a big lead like that was nice. Then we go into the second day we didn't play near as well as we did the first day. The scores obviously show it but in the attitudes we had, there might have been a sense that we were going to walk away with it and they were going to just hand us the trophy. We tightened up a little bit later on as we weren't playing as well. To Boise's credit they charged back. They had a couple of great rounds. That made it a tournament again. I just think on that day, the second day, Boise was more motivated and they were hungry to get back in the tournament and they did.
So we go into the final round and Josh Stewart's on the driving range trying to warm up and can't hardly grip the club. We didn't know what was wrong. He tried warming up and was in quite a bit of pain but he wanted to play, which it was the final round of the WAC Championship and he wanted to be there for his team. He just wasn't able to go, he played four holes and was just ineffective and was only going to do himself more harm than good by continuing.
I went around to the course, the other four were well out onto the course when I had taken Josh in. They had all gotten off to reasonable start but I told each and every one of them that Josh was out and we were just playing four guys in that last round. That got rid of any final round jitters for us being in a tight tournament. They knew they had no safety net. They had nobody to rely on, their score was going to count. What I was most pleased with, you could almost see it in everyone's eyes, they kind of got a little squinty and white-eyed and understood that we had a challenge in front of us. Almost instantaneously everybody made one or two birdies right after that and pushed us in front of Boise by the middle of that back side for good.
After the jump we have more from our interview with Coach Lieberwirth.
On to today's links and the rest of the interview...
