Cal men's golf

“It was an eye-opening round in terms of what we’re capable of doing,” head coach Walter Chun said. “Coaches always believe that they can perform at a high level, and having players execute what you hope and believe they can do — it’s what coaches dream of.”

For the past 16 years, Cal has hosted the annual invitational at Meadow Club in Fairfax. The team’s familiarity with the course is undoubtedly going to be an advantage once again — just as it was in 2017 as the Bears dominated the rest of the field, winning by 17 strokes.

Morikawa is fresh off a strong junior season, as he was named Golfweek Men’s Player of the Year and ranked No. 1 by Golfweek/Sagarin and Golfstat for the 2017-18 season.

The inaugural Big Match was a four-ball contest played at Menlo Country Club. Cal sent six pairs, each with a representative from the men’s and women’s teams (with the exception of one pair in which both members were from the women’s team) to compete against six Stanford pairs.

On top of beating last year’s finish in the tournament, the Bears were also determined to prove themselves after an 11th-place finish at the Carpet Capital Collegiate tournament in Georgia last weekend.

With several seasoned players, the team hoped to continue this improvement at the start of the new school year, but its 11th-place finish showed how much work could still be done to reach its end-of-season goals.

With a fall schedule nearly identical to that of a year ago, the Bears are headed into familiar territory and should know what to anticipate.

This weekend, rising Cal golf seniors Collin Morikawa and KK Limbhasut got the rare opportunity to compete against each other at the Arnold Palmer Cup at the Evian Resort Golf Club in Évian-les-Bains, France.

The accolades keep pouring in for Cal golf’s rising senior Collin Morikawa. This past week, Morikawa was named Golfweek Men’s Player of the Year, one of the biggest honors in collegiate game. In doing so, he became the second Cal player to ever receive the prestigious award, after Michael Kim did so in 2013.

But Morikawa, the current No. 1 player in the entire country, had bigger aspirations than simply soaking in the atmosphere of the weekend. True to his player profile, Morikawa would go in with the mindset of winning even if all odds were pitted against him — a silent assassin.