May 13, 2023
(Cover photo courtesy Illinois Athletics)
Illinois men's golf coach Mike Small and his program are coming off another incredible regular season. Seven tournament wins and their eighth consecutive Big Ten championship. Small won his 13th Big Ten Coach of the Year award and all of his players received all-conference honors.
He appeared on the IlliniGuys Sports Spectacular show this weekend ahead of the team's trip to the NCAA Regional in Bath, Michigan where the Illini are the #1 seed.
Larry Smith: NCAA tournament time is here, but let’s talk about your team’s amazing and dominating performance at the Big Ten tournament in New Jersey a couple of weeks ago.
Mike Small: Yeah, you know, we knew the weather could be iffy. Two weeks out, we looked at the extended forecast and the closer we got, it still stayed the same. And when we flew out there, we knew that this thing could be shortened to one or two rounds, you never know. So we prepared for that mentally. And the first round, we played solid at a six-shot lead. But there's some good teams in the Big Ten. There's four teams inside the top 35 or 40 in the country. So it's a good, good conference. After the first round, the weather lightened up a little bit. And we knew we had to go and because the last day’s forecast was bad again. So we prepared for this, we were ready for it. And we came out the second round and extended our lead. And yeah, (a lead of) 17 shots for two rounds is a lot. We'd won by a lot more than that when the event used to be four rounds. But since it's been condensed to three rounds, I think that's one of the bigger wins.
