Golf Trip

I took a little bye week vacation on Monday and Tuesday. Instead of poring over NERDstats all day (the next NERDstats post won't go up until next week so that I can add this weekend's data), I went and watched some golf in Ohio. Even though the Illini finished 2nd – an uncharacteristic "caught Missouri on the final day like I thought we would but got clipped at the line by Xavier" performance – it was the perfect escape for me. During a bye week, I need my brain to think about something besides Illini football.

This post will just be me walking you through my trip. Dan from The Field Pass went with me on this trip (more on that in a bit) and we got a lot of good content. Some I've shared on Twitter, some I've shared on Slack, but most of it I'll share here. Right to it.

Day One

First off, this was a test trip of sorts. I still don't know where I'm going with any of this, but I wanted to see what kinds of things two people could capture while covering a college golf tournament. I asked Dan if he could join me for these two days to assist with that. Assist he did.

When I say "test trip", that's exactly what this was. I tweeted less at this tournament than any tourney I've covered in the last few years because we were... working on things. I had an idea in my head but was open to any way we could execute it so we tried different things both days. I did know I wanted to do one thing: record a hole where one of us films from the tee and the other one of us from the green. After recording videos at double digit Illini golf tournaments over the years, I felt like I could better tell the story if I had a second person filming from the opposite view.

But first I needed some trial and error. That's why this article isn't "here's some fully produced golf content." This is "here's us figuring it out." Plus a few interviews with Mike Small.

I told Dan that my concept here was "YouTube golf meets college golf." That golf shots filmed on phones can be quite interesting. And he had the great idea to use one of the shot tracer apps and add the ball flight to the videos.

He also had a secret weapon. He just got the iPhone 17 Pro Max and the camera was incredible. I'm still five months away from my next upgrade but yeah, I'm getting that thing ASAP. I'm not going to film a single golf shot next spring without it. The zoom is perhaps 79 times better than my current iPhone.

So we set out to capture a lot of shots (and play with the shot tracer app). You might have seen some of it posted on Twitter, but if not, here's an example of both things I was talking about above. This is him zoomed in from the 13th green getting Ryan Voois teeing off on 14. The quality here is going to be suppressed by the condensing of the video file, but this is the kind of thing we were playing around with:

(As I was posting that I realized how dumb it was to use that as an example of the video quality. The original video he sent to me was 103 MB. By the time I take it through the shot tracer app and then it's condensed by our blogging platform for viewing on this page, the file is 10.8 MB. I'm showing you 1/10th the quality of the original and then saying "you should see the clarity of these videos!" Dumb.)

Anyway, that's what we were working on. When you saw me tweeting stuff like this from the course...

...that was just me taking a video standing below the 4th tee (I'm on the cart path there even though it looks like I'm hiding in the tall grass), running it through the shot tracer app, and then posting it. It will take me a bit to get the hang of it but I plan to utilize this a lot next spring.

I mentioned above that I wanted to film one hole where one of us was on the tee and one of us was behind the green. We chose the 18th hole for that. I almost didn't get there for Dane Huddleston's tee shot (that's why this first one is so far away), but if you want to know what it's like to attend a college golf tournament where all five players come through back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back, here you go. And this is probably a better example of the zoom that Dan could accomplish with his superhuman phone from a vantage point behind the green:

The golf? The golf on Monday was just OK. Missouri jumped out to a big lead (14 strokes at one point during the afternoon round) and we were playing just... OK. Ryan Voois led the way (he shot a 69 and a 67 in the two rounds on Monday) and the Illini, thanks to a late charge (including the two birdies you just saw), were 6 shots back of Missouri and 2 shots back of Xavier after Day 1.

And it was a consistent 3rd place. Missouri was in first thanks to a guy who put up a 62 in the first round and another guy who went 69-68 in the first two rounds. They couldn't hold that lead on Tuesday – the guy who was 9-under after the first round played the last two rounds 3-over – but when two guys go low, they can boost the whole team.

This is probably a good time to note that if your score is good because one guy went super low, it's not an indication of future success. If two college teams are tied at -8 after one round with one team going -4, -2, -2, and E with +1 as the drop score and the other going -9, -1, E, and +2 with +8 as the drop score, the team with the bunched scores will almost always win the next round. -2 from each of your four counting scores is preferable to one guy at -8 with three others at even. Someone firing a 62 is like a punt return for a touchdown. It's great, but you can't count on it to help your team win.

I talked to Mike Small both days and he touched on some of that stuff. Here's our conversation after the first two rounds were completed on Monday. And I'm going to identify this as the "if you only click on one play button in this article, click on this one" portion of this post. It's why Mike Small was recently voted by his peers as the top college golf coach in the country in this Golfweek article.

Mike Small October 13th

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So that was Day One. Let's move on to...

Day Two

I'll talk about the golf first, then I'll get to the content.

As I said above, it wasn't surprising to see Missouri fade and Illinois surge into the lead with four holes left. It was surprising to see Xavier dominate those last four holes to clip the Illini by three shots. When you pass the leader on the final turn of the 1600, you can't then get passed by someone who out-kicks you.

But that's what happened. The five Illini played the final four holes at +4, Xavier played them at +1, and there's your difference. Illinois took a brief one shot lead when Dane Huddleston birdied the 17th hole and I thought we would put them away. But then Huddleston, who started on #4 in the shotgun start and still had to play 18 plus 1-2-3, bogeyed three of the last four holes to fall down and become the drop score. Xavier's Ray Filter hit two fantastic shots on #18 and #1 (he birdied both) and that was all she wrote.

This was my first viewing of the two transfers: junior Dane Huddleston from Utah Valley and sophomore Freddie Turnell from Arkansas-Little Rock. My big takeaways for each? Freddie runs red hot (has something to say to himself after every bad shot, which, honestly, I can identify with) and Dane just couldn't get the putter going. I felt like Dane would have been -8 if he could have made any putts at all. Instead, unfortunately, +1 for the tournament. That might earn him a spot on the bench for the final fall tournament this weekend in Mississippi because freshman Dujuan Snyman put up a team-best -7 playing as an individual.

I talked to Mike Small again after the round – this time I needed to get on the road so I could drive all the way back to Champaign for my 5:25 radio spot on WDWS (I arrived at exactly 5:22) – so this interview is about half the length of the last one. Still, you can clearly hear the message Mike Small was about to deliver to his team:

Mike Small October 14th

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All in all, the tournament was a disappointment for an Illini golf squad with high expectations. After a great showing in the Illini Invitational in September and a win at Northwestern's tournament, this should have been another win. There were no other top-25 teams in this field, so the team the coaches ranked #8 should have run away with it. Every one of these guys will tell you that a second place finish wasn't good enough and wasn't up to the standard of Illini golf.

As for the documenting? That went well. Mostly for Dan. I tweeted a lot of what I collected that day (I had a cart and was hopping around hole to hole trying to keep people updated on what was happening) but Dan was off doing something else. When we arrived at the course that morning he suggested following one player all day and documenting every shot. I loved the idea. And I love the outcome even more.

Here's the 18 minute video he produced after following the guy running the anchor leg for the Illini – Ryan Voois - for 18 (er, 17) holes. Before watching, please note these things:

• Voois will be the first one to tell you that this was his bad round. He went 69-67-73 over the three rounds, and Dan captured the 73. (I'd kill for 73 to be a "bad round." OK, fine - I'd kill for 93 to be a "bad round.")
• Note the speed of some of the greens. As they firmed up, the players just had to be safe all day. I watched several putts/chips on 9 and not a single player came anywhere close to trying to make it. Everything was a lag (unless they ended up directly below the hole, which no one did).
• Moraine Country Club is a great golf course. For me, getting to see these historic courses (Byron Nelson won the PGA Championship here) is one of the best parts of covering these tournaments. 3-4-5-6 is such a fantastic stretch of holes, as you will see in the video below.

Here we go. Holes 2 through 18 for Ryan Voois in the final round:

Major props to Dan for putting this together. He uploaded the final video into the Dropbox folder at 4:07 am this morning. I happened to wake up at 4:00 am today, so when I opened my laptop, I saw that there was a file being uploaded. I watched it immediately and loved what he put together.

And that was the point of this. Why get two hotel rooms and a rental car to travel to Dayton, Ohio for two days to cover a B-minus college golf tournament? To see what's possible with phone video (and to see if I'd need to purchase actual cameras to document tournaments like this).

The verdict? I'm just gonna upgrade to the iPhone 17 so I can zoom in on the individual bricks on my neighbor's house 90 yards away.