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Freshman Lange Starts Strong 9/30/2004
Freshman Lange Starts Strong Freshman golfer Brett Lange likes to tell people that he met Tiger Woods this summer. The incident occurred as Lange roamed the grounds of Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in New York over the weekend of the U.S. Open. Lange just missed qualifying to compete in the Grand Slam event as an amateur straight out of high school. Because he shot a two-round total of 138 to finish as the first alternate he was rewarded with a trip to Southampton, NY to witness the Open firsthand. He also socialized with some of the world’s best golfers, including Woods. “He’s the man,” Lange says of his favorite golfer. “I like to say I met Tiger, but really I just said ‘hey’ to him. But it was just fun for me to up there.” Lange didn’t waste much time in propelling his early-summer success into his young career at Vanderbilt. Following in the recent footsteps of teammates Luke List and Mark Donnell, he has burst off to a hot start in the fall of his first collegiate season. He opened his Vanderbilt career by winning the annual Rudolph Cup, which is awarded to the winner of the team’s six-round fall qualifying tournament. Played at the Vanderbilt Legends Club and the Golf Club of Tennessee, the tournament serves as a measuring stick of sorts for both Head Coach Press McPhaul and the team members themselves. Lange finished with a decisive 17-under-par total, beating out List and Donnell, both of whom also won the Cup as freshmen. “[The Rudolph Cup] was awesome,” Lange recalled. “There are so many good players on the team, and it’s fun to go out there and be aggressive and play well. They don’t really know my game at all so it was fun to go out there and prove myself.” He followed the Rudolph Cup by leading his Vanderbilt team in their first varsity tournament — the Mason Rudolph Championships Sept. 27-28. Lange shot two-under par 211 for 54 holes to finish in a tie for fifth among the 75 competitors. Coming off such a spectacular summer and pre-season, Lange inevitably sets high goals for himself and his team as he prepares to enter regular season competition. “Obviously I’d love to be All-American,” he admits, “but we’ve got four seniors on the team; we’ve got the best team we’ve ever had maybe, and it would be awesome to win the national championship. I think we have a good shot at doing it; I think that’s the number one goal.” As a freshman, Lange definitely benefits from the team’s experience and depth. He feels no unrealistic expectations to carry the team or even lift them to the next level. Rather, he must wrestle primarily with his own hopes and anticipations. “The main pressure comes from expectations that I have for myself. I don’t really feel pressure from anywhere else,” he said. Learning to keep those expectations in perspective, though, will be one of his largest challenges. “Brett can’t put too much pressure on himself as a freshman because he has a lot of hype surrounding him coming in here,” Donnell warns. “But you can’t listen to that stuff. I don’t think he will; he’s done well, and he was unbelievable in qualifying.” The other principal factor with which Lange will have to deal is the difference in seasons between high school and college. Unlike a typical high school season, which plays out throughout the spring or the fall, the college season is played in both the spring and fall, with a three-month winter break. “In high school I never played in the winter; the only problem is I didn’t really play in the fall, so that might be different,” Lange admits. “I pretty much played in the spring and the summer, so the weather I have to deal with in the fall is going to be new to me.” Besides adjusting to the physical element of new and different weather, though, the two-part season sometimes poses difficulty from a mental aspect, as well. “I remember it being weird for me,” Donnell said. “It definitely takes some adjustments, but it’s still just you and a golf ball.” Lange seems to take a similarly low-key attitude toward the potentially challenging aspects of the split season. He focuses instead on the team’s particular strategies for dealing with each half of the year. “In the fall, we really want to make a statement of what we’re all about,” he explained. “Once the fall is over, it’s over. We’ll think about it, but no matter how we play [in the fall] it’s not going to matter in the spring. I think the spring season is what we’re most concerned about. We’re going to try to win every tournament [in the fall] but focus on the spring.” Unfortunately for Lange and the Commodores, their first tournament, Georgia Tech’s Carpet Capital Classic, scheduled for the weekend of Sept. 18, was cancelled due to Hurricane Ivan. Although the team officially begins their season this Monday, in their home event, the Mason Rudolph Invitational, the cancellation forces them to wait until Oct. 11 for their first away tournament. “It was tough,” Lange said of the cancelled tournament. “I was really looking forward to it. Coming off the Rudolph Cup, I was playing well, and going to travel with the guys, it was just going to be a lot of fun, so I’m going to have to wait a couple of weeks. Now we have a couple weeks to work on our games, though?we just have to go with it.” In the meantime, Lange will try to continue on the same path that has gotten him so far. Like Tiger Woods, it ultimately comes down to the love of the game and the love of competition for Brett Lange. “My favorite aspect is to compete,” he asserted. “With other sports, you just need to react. With golf, if you hit a bad shot you have to think about if for ten minutes. It’s just so much fun when you’re out there competing; that’s just my favorite part.” If this past summer means anything, then Brett Lange has the competition aspect down. Now it’s up to him to develop his excellent start into a solid freshman season for his team. |
