UNLV men’s golf team fails to advance at NCAA championship

UNLV shot 16 over par Sunday and fell six strokes shy of advancing past the third round of the NCAA men’s golf championship at Blessings Golf Club in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

The Rebels’ score dropped them from 16th place to a tie for 20th with Liberty at 42 over par. UNLV needed to reach the top 15 to qualify for Monday’s final round of stroke play.

“I don’t think we had the patience to really handle a lot of the difficulty,” Rebels coach Dwaine Knight said. “One of the big things you have to do on a day like this is minimize your misses. In other words, it can’t be a big miss. You can get away with small misses, but not big ones, and we had several of those today. We paid the price for it.”

Defending champion Oklahoma State was the only team under par (12 under) and held a 25-stroke cushion over second place Stanford and Texas.

UNLV’s Jack Trent shot par 72, lowering his score from the second round by seven strokes. But he was the exception, with Justin Kim (75), Harry Hall (78) and David Rauch (82) posting higher scores. Kim, though, earned his way into a three-player sudden death playoff Monday morning for the final individual spot in stroke play.

Knight replaced J.J. Gresco with Alex Jordan and saw some improvement in that fifth spot. After Gresco shot 84-82, Jordan took his place and carded 79.

Other than Hall, UNLV will return its core lineup next season.

“And our recruiting that will be here next year is pretty strong,” Knight said. “So we’ll have a lot more depth and some really outstanding players. It should be a lot of fun next year, but it’s disappointing when you have a chance like this with these guys. I would’ve liked to have seen them really step up. We closed the gap (Saturday), but we didn’t get out there (Sunday) and get it done.”

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Contact Mark Anderson at manderson@reviewjournal.com. Follow @markanderson65 on Twitter.