Toughness Takes Dawgs Into Regional Play
May 14, 2022 | Men's Golf, Joel Coleman
An early-season commitment has MSU playing its best golf at the end of the campaign.
STARKVILLE – It was the first team meeting of the year for Mississippi State men's golf. This was months ago, but head coach Dusty Smith recalls it like it was this morning.
The message Smith wanted to pass along to his team was clear. For the Bulldogs to get where they wanted to go, to be the team they wanted to be, they needed toughness. Right then and there, they committed to it.
"I had a big board in the locker room that spelled it out," Smith said. "I said, 'If you're all in, you need to sign this thing. It's your commitment to living out toughness.'"
They all did. The Dawgs cemented that, no matter what they encountered in the year ahead, they'd face it with toughness. Or, to be completely accurate, T.O.U.G.H.N.E.S.S.
In the MSU golf brand of toughness, every letter has a meaning. Everything works hand in hand.
The T is for team – playing for each other and lifting each other up. The O is for opportunity and capitalizing on those chances. The U stands for uncomfortable, more specifically, being comfortable in uncomfortable situations. The G represents gratitude and the H is for humility, both characteristics that are beneficial in life and on the golf course. The N is a reminder to make no excuses. E is for having an elite mindset. The first S nudges the guys to do the simple things it takes to be successful at all times and the final S is about setting and living up to a standard.
Time has passed since each Bulldog golfer put it in ink that they were all in on toughness. But with MSU set for play in the New Haven Regional beginning Monday – the school's fourth-straight NCAA Championships appearance – they might be embracing toughness now more than ever.
But how did it start? Why did toughness become such a theme for this team? Smith explains it this way:
"We ended the season not very well last year – for whatever reason," Smith said. "We made it to postseason. We had a fine year. But I felt like in the biggest tournaments towards the end of the year – the SEC Championship and the NCAA Regionals – we didn't perform up to our standards. As a head coach, I take that personally. So, in the summer time, myself and [assistant coach Steven Paine] were kind of thinking…"
The brainstorming began. The Bulldogs headed into this year with very few certainties. Outside of senior Ford Clegg, who'd obviously played a ton of MSU golf, and junior Hunter Logan, who'd had a solid spring in 2021, there were many unknowns.
"So, we really didn't know what kind of team we were going to have coming into this year, but the one thing we did know is we wanted to have more of an identity," Smith said. "It was like, 'Hey, this is who Mississippi State golf is. This is what we're going to do, and this is how we're going to do it.' So, we came up with an acronym at the beginning of the year and shared it with the team."
T.O.U.G.N.E.S.S. was born.
"We kind of came up with, 'Hey, if we live out toughness on a daily basis, then ultimately, we're going to be better at the end," Smith said. "And if we're better at the end, we're going to be able to knock off some of our program goals like making postseason and getting to the SEC match play and hopefully making a national championship and so on and so forth…Our whole message this entire year was, 'Hey, let's not focus on the result of every tournament.' Because I feel like you can live or die off of results. If you're playing well, things can be great. If you're not playing well, things can be terrible. So, we just constantly preached, 'Hey, let's just live out toughness and our ultimate goal is to be better at the end when it matters the most. If we live up to our standard on a day-to-day basis, then we eventually will be better at the end when it matters the most.'"
And that's exactly what has happened. In MSU's final regular-season tournament – the Bulldogs' home event, the Mossy Oak Collegiate Championship – State stood out.
"I felt like we had a chance to win the golf tournament headed into the back nine and unfortunately, we came up short," Smith said. "But we felt like, as a team, we were really starting to hit our stride."
Then came the SEC Championships where Mississippi State's toughness was on full display. Needing to be in the top eight after three rounds of stroke play to qualify for match play, the Bulldogs sat tied for seventh after the first round.
The second round didn't go as smoothly. At one point in the day, MSU was five strokes out of eighth place. But again, the State toughness mantra is all about staying strong and finishing better at the end. With that, the Dawgs responded.
Mississippi State played the final four holes of the second round at 4-under par. Pedro Cruz Silva shined for the Bulldogs with five birdies, including four in a row on Holes 15 through 18 to help MSU end the second round in eighth place, still in standing to advance to match play.
"It was such a huge boost for us," Smith said of Cruz Silva's day.
Then, needing just one more solid round to get to match play, adversity struck.
"I didn't sleep much that night headed into the final round so I looked at my phone at about 3 a.m. and I had a text from Pedro," Smith said. "Whenever you get a text from a player at an odd hour, you know it's never good."
Cruz Silva wasn't feeling well. He'd be unable to play in Round 3. That was the bad news.
The good news? Well, there was that Bulldog teamwide toughness to lean on. There was an opportunity for someone to step in and help. That someone was Harrison Davis – a sophomore who'd never been in the State lineup for a team event until…
"I knocked on Harrison's door at about 5:45 a.m.," Smith recalled. "I said, 'Harrison, you're in. You're going to be put in an extremely uncomfortable situation, which we've prepared for our whole year because the U in toughness stands for uncomfortable.' We talked about it all year – being comfortable with the uncomfortable. Being put in an uncomfortable situation and taking advantage of that opportunity. He just kind of smiled at me and he says, 'I'm ready coach.'"
Davis had earned this opportunity as an alternate weeks prior. Smith wasn't sure who he was using as his postseason substitute player until Davis went out and shot a final-round 66 at the Mossy Oak Collegiate to finish at ninth place in that tournament in a challenging field.
Fast-forward to the SECs, and there is Davis staring down the biggest challenge of his golfing career to date.
"And let me just tell you something, he handled it like an absolute veteran," Smith said. "I walked with him all 18 holes and he got off to a little shaky start. He was 2-over through three. But he never looked fazed. He looked like he was born for that moment."
Davis shot a 71. Fifth-year senior Benjamin Nelson bounced back from a tough first couple of rounds to shoot a 70. Everyone contributed.
The highlight of the day though belonged to Davis. On Hole 18, he found himself in position for a 35-foot putt for birdie. Keep in mind, in this moment, State was still fighting to be in the top eight in order to advance to match play.
"Before [Davis] hit the putt, he looked at me and he goes, 'Coach, do I need to make this?'" Smith said. "I just looked at him and was like, 'Well Harrison, I wouldn't say you have to make it, but it'd help us out a lot if you did make this putt.' He walked that thing in. With about five feet left before it got to the hole, he was already walking to go pick it up. He knew it was in. That was a pretty cool moment."
Mississippi State indeed ended up in the top eight – by one stroke. Davis' toughness – and the toughness of every single Bulldog – had paid off.
MSU ultimately fell 3-2 to top-seeded Vanderbilt in match play. But even then, the Bulldogs shined in defeat. Clegg and Logan both won their matches and beat two Top-25 ranked amateurs. Ruan Pretorius fought back from a two-stroke deficit with two holes to play and pushed the match to an extra hole before falling by one stroke. Davis took his match all the way to the final hole.
The Bulldogs fought to the absolute end and even with the loss, set the stage for the Regional to come.
"The cool thing about this team this year has been how we've embraced failure," Smith said. "I think that's been the biggest thing for this group this year. We have a saying on the team. If I say the word, 'Arena', it just means get in the arena. It's going to be uncomfortable. It might be ugly. But you're going to have to be vulnerable and you can't be scared to fail. If you do fail, we almost look at failure as a good thing now where it's just like, 'Hey, I fell short, but I was in the arena and I learned from it.' It's a team that's really focused on a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset."
State will look to carry its growth right into Regional play. The Bulldogs have grown all year long. They're playing better at the end. They've embraced toughness. And they're not done yet.
"It's certainly not easy," Smith said. "Throughout a season, you have highs and lows. It's easy when the waters get rough to jump ship a little bit, but they never did. They just stayed in the boat. They believed in it, and it paid off at the SEC Championships. Now we're hoping to do something special at Regionals. We'd like to win it… If we don't and we fall short, then I can tell you this group is going to learn from it."
It's just what tough teams do.
