If this current gig doesn’t work out, University of Utah men’s golf coach Garrett Clegg might have a career in the school’s public relations department, or working for the state’s office of tourism.
The former Ute golfer has spent the last five years selling his program, and the city and state where it is located, and those efforts are starting to pay off.
“Salt Lake is an incredible city,” Clegg said, reciting his recruiting pitch. “I love it, and I am very passionate about it. And when recruits see how much I love Utah, and I love the state, and I love everything it has to offer, I think it gets them excited. Living in Salt Lake really is incredible.”
Long considered a sleeping giant in the college golf world — not exactly a compliment — Utah recently reached a rather significant milestone under Clegg’s guidance. Powered by All-Pac-12 golfers Blake Tomlinson and Mitchell Schow, and Javier Barcos, a member of the conference’s All-Newcomer Team, the Utes qualified for the NCAA regionals for the first time since 1992, and only the third time in program history.
“Salt Lake is an incredible city. I love it, and I am very passionate about it. And when recruits see how much I love Utah, and I love the state, and I love everything it has to offer, I think it gets them excited. Living in Salt Lake really is incredible.” — Ute golf coach Garrett Clegg
Utah, ranked No. 54 in the most recent golfstat.com college golf rankings, will play in the 2021 NCAA Division I Men’s Golf West Regional in Cle Elum, Washington, next week. The tournament, one of six 13- or 14-team regionals throughout the country, is May 17-19 at the Tumble Creek Golf & Country Club; the top five teams advance to the NCAA championships at Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Arizona, May 28 to June 2.
“My expectation is we go out and we fight like crazy and we do everything that we have done all year long and if we play our very best, I know we are capable of making it to nationals,” Clegg told the Deseret News recently in a wide-ranging interview. “If we just play mediocre or average, we won’t get through. So I am excited to see what we bring and no matter what, I am super proud of all these boys and all they have done and all their hard work.”
If the Utes do make nationals, Clegg should receive a raise, or perhaps a plaque at the sparkling new $2.9 million indoor practice facility — The David S. Layton Golf Academy — that he helped develop on campus across the street from the football offices.
Five years ago, when Clegg was hired to replace 12-year coach Randall McCracken, the program was a perennial Pac-12 cellar-dweller. That the Utes were incredibly disappointed to finish tied for ninth at the Pac-12 championships last month in Santa Rosa, California, illustrates just how far the program has come.
“The good thing is we played poorly to finish ninth, rather than thinking that it was a major accomplishment for our golf program,” Clegg said.
Fortunately for the Utes, that performance and a disappointing sixth-place finish at the BYU Cougar Classic the previous week — San Francisco won the event at Riverside Country Club in Provo and nonregional qualifier BYU was third — didn’t keep them out of the Big Dance because of their play in several events leading up to the end-of-April struggles.
“Last year, our team would have made it to regionals, too,” Clegg said, citing progress made the previous few years. “We were just outside the bubble when the year was ended by COVID-19. But that team was good enough, assuming we played at an average level. I am very confident we would have gone to regionals as a team.”
Last year, the Utes had just finished fifth at the prestigious Bandon Dunes Championship in Oregon when Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz tested positive for the virus and the entire sports world was pretty much shut down.
Suddenly, the season was over for the best Utes golf team in decades.
“They got a bucket of ice water dumped on top of them,” Clegg said at the time.
Keeping the band together
College golf seasons are played in two parts — from September to November in the fall and February to May in the spring — but the Utes, much like their football team, were unable to start it up again last September.
The good news, though, was that Schow was able to return for a fifth season this spring, despite having status on the PGA Tour-Latin America (which didn’t resume playing due to the pandemic) and join 2020 holdovers Tomlinson, Tristan Mandur, Jesper von Reedtz and Barcos, from Estella, Spain.
Clegg was saddened that 2020 seniors Jordan Costello and Peyton Hastings weren’t able to return.
With the consistent five-man lineup of Tomlinson, Schow, Mandur, Barcos and von Reedtz, Utah had six top-10 finishes this spring and won the SUU-hosted Pat Hicks Thunderbird Invitational with a 54-hole record score of 41-under at Sunbrook Golf Course in St. George.
“The starting five we have had this spring is pretty much the starting five we had all last year,” Clegg said. “They picked up where they left off. … We have known for a long time that we’ve got a really good team, and now this (NCAA bid) is a huge jump forward for us.”
Tomlinson, a Skyline High product who lost to Schow, a Park City High product, 3 and 2 in the finals of the Utah State Amateur last September, is ranked 81st in the country individually and is only the second Ute to earn All-Pac-12 second-team honors, joining Kyler Dunkle (2019).
Tomlinson recorded four top-10 finishes in eight tournaments this spring, and his nine career top-10 finishes ties for third-most in Utah men’s golf history.
Schow has three top-10 finishes and was Utah’s top player at the Pac-12 championships, tying for eighth.
When the NCAA qualifiers were announced May 5, the Utes were reasonably sure they would get invited because they are 54th in the rankings and usually the top 60 make it. Ranked 75th, BYU did not after a second-place finish behind No. 7 Pepperdine at the WCC championships in Henderson, Nevada.
“Golf is a hard sport to predict,” Clegg said, when asked what his expectations are for regionals. “For us to succeed, the reality is our best players have to play great. Blake and Mitchell have to have great weeks. Tristan, Jesper and Javi all have to play well.
“The reality is we are a ninth seed,” he continued. “They only take five, so we have to have a great week. We’ve got to beat the teams that are ranked ahead of us. How’s that for a prediction?”
Rebuilding a program
Before Clegg, a Bountiful native who was Washington State’s head coach for five years before returning to Utah and became the coach, the program “lived from 130th to 180th in the country” in the team rankings, he said.
The Utes hadn’t won a team event since 2009; its last medalist was Dustin Pimm, in 2007.
Schow was recruited by McCracken, but Clegg landed a transfer — Dunkle, from Colorado State — and he became a cornerstone of the rebuilding effort.
The following year, the coach kept Tomlinson in Salt Lake City and got Mandur out of British Columbia, Canada, and the program jumped to about 80th in the rankings.
“That was a pretty decent jump,” Clegg said. “But really, the big jump is when you get inside the top 60 or 65. That is really hard to do. There are a lot of teams that are out there recruiting with two coaches. They have big budgets, and there are a lot of people trying really hard to be good at golf.”
It is especially tough for “cold-weather schools” to make the leap, he said, but by his third year the program was reaching that point.
The big breakthrough came in his third season when Utah won the Bandon Dunes Championship on March 12, 2019, and Tomlinson was the medalist. Utah tied for fifth and Dunkle was second in the Pac-12 championships six weeks later, its highest finishes ever at the conference tournament.
“I remember it well — we moved up to 60th in the rankings,” Clegg said.
Dunkle became the Utes’ first All-American since since Roger Calvin in the 1970s, Clegg believes.
“So that became another telltale sign that we were moving up.”
On par with BYU?
For the last half-century, BYU has been the big dog in local collegiate golf. The Cougars built their program by getting some of the top talent from around the country, but also by getting most of the top players in the state of Utah — not known for producing major golf talent, albeit probably underrated a tad as players such as Daniel Summerhays, Zac Blair and Tony Finau reached the PGA Tour.
Is the tide turning?
Not so fast, says Clegg.
“I think it would be a huge disservice to all their program is, and has been, to say that we are even close to being on par with them. They have a ton of resources and they have done an incredible job there, and so we have a long, long, long ways before we, as a program, can really be mentioned in the same breath as their program because of their history and everything.” — Ute golf coach Garrett Clegg on whether the Utes are now on even footing with BYU
“I think it would be a huge disservice to all their program is, and has been, to say that we are even close to being on par with them,” Clegg said. “They have a ton of resources and they have done an incredible job there, and so we have a long, long, long ways before we, as a program, can really be mentioned in the same breath as their program because of their history and everything.”
This year, however, the Utes can say they have been as good as BYU, if not slightly better. The Cougars did finish ahead of them at the Cougar Classic, but that was on BYU’s home course. Overall, Utah had a better spring, which is why they are playing next week in Washington and BYU’s season is over, outside of Carson Lundell, who qualified for the regionals as an individual.
“Over the next four or five years, my goal is to be the best program in the state of Utah,” Clegg said. “This year, we were, from a rankings standpoint, the best team. Does that mean we are a better long-term, overall program? No, not yet. We are not there yet.”
Clegg, who began his own college golf career at Minnesota before transferring to Utah for the final two years, says there is room for both Utah and BYU to create top-10 or top-15 golf programs.
“I believe we have incredible support at Utah now,” he said. “I believe we can build a program that competes at an extremely high level. It will be great for the state and for the city and for the golf community that we have here.”