OXFORD – The best course of action, Ole Miss men’s golf coach Chris Malloy knew, was to remind his team of last season’s pain. Because, in the long run, it was going to fuel this season’s journey.
And while there is a spring season left to complete, it looks like the Rebels took Malloy’s message to heart.
Last season, Ole Miss was the No. 2 seed in the Stanford regional, the highest seeding ever for the program. Ole Miss had made the last seven NCAA men’s golf tournaments, but Malloy truly felt that the 2023-24 team had a chance to do special things. The Rebels ended up missing the cut at the Stanford regional by a single stroke, finishing the final round plus-four strokes and ranked No. 10 in the country.
It was devastating, Malloy admits. But he knows his team wouldn’t be standing where it is right now without that hurt.
Ole Miss is the No. 1 team in college golf for the first time ever following a fall season where the team finished second in its first two tournaments before winning the last two. The Rebels returned the majority of their core from 2023-24 – Michael La Sasso, Kye Meeks, Cameron Tankersley and Tom Fischer – and added Cohen Trolio from LSU. Through the offseason and the start of the fall, the Rebels remembered the pain from last spring and weren’t afraid to confront it.
“We’re not going to run away from anything. … It’s easy to embrace the good times. We have to embrace the bad times,” Malloy said. “One of our mottos with our guys, we talk about all the time, is being comfortable, being uncomfortable. … If we’re going to sit here and not talk about the elephant in the room, then we’re probably not going to be very successful.
“I thought it was a teachable moment last year, and I thought that it’s a coachable moment at the beginning of this year. If we’re scared of that, we’re scared of what happened to us, then we’ll probably be in that same position time and time again.”
Ole Miss started its fall season with second-place finishes at the Visit Knoxville Collegiate and the Valero Texas Collegiate. The moment Malloy knew his team had a little something extra, though, was in the third tournament – the Empire State at the Hamptons Intercollegiate. The weather was abysmal; so windy and rainy, in fact, that it was nearly impossible to open an umbrella, Malloy said.
But the Rebels fought through the elements and won handily by 20 strokes. Ole Miss then finished the fall with a 20-stroke win at the Fallen Oak Collegiate Invitational.
“It was blowing sideways,” Malloy said. “ … For our guys to have done that, I kind of went, ‘OK, this is kind of another gear.’ … I knew that they had another gear, and they were just kind of starting to shift into it.”
The fall season is just part of an entire college golf campaign. The Rebels’ season is on hiatus until February when they will compete at the Thomas Sharkey Invitational. There’s a part of Malloy that wishes his team still had some tournaments coming in the near future – you never want to end a heater, he said with a laugh. But a little rest isn’t the worst thing for his team from a physical and mental standpoint.
There’s a lot of golf left to be played this season. But Malloy feels this team has a real chance to win the national championship.
“Absolutely. And I did last year. I felt last year we had to have some things go right. … This year, we have an absolute chance,” Malloy said. “I wouldn’t trade this group for anything. But we have a lot of work to do. … This group is pretty special.”
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