ACC Men's Golf Championship Begins Thursday

Ram Tough

By Lee Pace, Special to GoHeels.com

The standard golf statistics of fairways hit, greens in regulation and putts per round are the domain of the game's purists who measure everyone by Ernie Els' tempo, Adam Scott's mechanics and Brooks Koepka's raw power. For Coach Andrew DiBitetto and the Carolina men's golf team, there's another face of the game, the one with a scratch and a bruise and a chipped tooth.

Toward that end, the large grease board in the Tar Heel team room at UNC Finley Golf Course displays a different array of stats for nine players: Up-and-downs, sand-saves, putts made from three-to-five feet, putts made from six-to-10 feet, three-putts per round and "bounce backs"—making a birdie immediately after a bogey, double bogey or worse.

"These are the only stats we keep," says DiBitetto, the Tar Heels' second-year coach. "We think they're the stats that best reflect toughness, resiliency and grit. Resiliency—that's a staple of our program. It's our identity and our culture."

And as assistant coach Matt Clark says when a Tar Heel hits a wayward shot into the woods or tall grass or creek bed, "All that's doing is setting you up to hit a great recovery."

The Tar Heels travel to the Old North State Club in New London beginning Thursday for the ACC Championship, hoping that a spring season highlighted by a win in their Tar Heel Intercollegiate, a second-place at Ponte Vedra, Fla., in late March and having two players finish in the top 10 last week in a talented field in the Arizona State Thunderbird will stake them to a reasonable shot at claiming a title they have not won outright since 1996. That was the year Mark Wilson won the first of the two straight individual titles he would collect before going on to win five tournaments on the PGA Tour.

And before that, you have to go to the early 1980s, when the Tar Heels won four of six ACC titles from 1981-86 with future Hall of Fame golfer Davis Love III capturing the individual crown in 1984. Love has been re-engaged with the program, returning a year ago to spend a weekend with the team and announcing a scholarship in his name.

"Davis Love has been amazing," DiBitetto says. "He's been to campus to kind of take a look at things and start to put some of his own ideas together. It's great to have him involved and engaged."

Senior Joshua Martin and junior Austin Hitt both finished in the top 10 last week in Phoenix. Hitt is ranked No. 32 in the country, has five top-six finishes this spring and has the team's lowest stroke average at just under 71 strokes a round. Also playing for the Tar Heels this weekend will be sophomore Ryan Gerard and freshmen Ryan Burnett and Dougie Ergood.

"As a program we have this relentless pursuit to always get better," says the 32-year-old DiBitetto, a native of Rochester, N.Y., a college golfer at Charlotte and an assistant at Carolina for six years under previous head coach Andrew Sapp. "I've received a lot of phone calls, emails and text messages with people saying, 'Congrats, you guys are trending in the right direction, this is really exciting.' A couple of people have used the word 'rebuilding.'

"I told the guys those people meant that as a compliment and it is, but there's also a little bit of that that irritates us. Because what that means is that they thought that the people that we have in this room right here weren't capable of doing the things that we're capable of. There is no such thing as re-building for this program. We are building and we are building to become one of the best, most consistent programs in the country every single year."

DiBitetto points to the final round of the John Hayt Collegiate Invitational in Ponte Vedra three weeks ago played in mid-50s temperatures, steady rain and wind blowing at 20 miles an hour and up. He pulls up a photo of Hitt from that round, the golfer's clothes soaked to the bone, raindrops falling in a thick wave but Hitt's eyes resolutely focused on lining up his putt.

"I love playing at Sawgrass," DiBitetto says. "It's a difficult, demanding course and the wind blows hard. They always have a tough field. The last round was an outstanding test for our guys' toughness and resiliency. Coach Clark and I are so proud of them and excited about the growth and development from a purely mental toughness standpoint."

DiBitetto knows of what he speaks in talking about mental toughness and grit. Growing up in upstate New York, he played hockey and golf and remembers days when he and his brother would shovel off a square patch of ground from the snow so they could hit balls. They would travel to Pinehurst for the Nike Winter National Series and show up wearing shorts on a 45-degree day.

"People looked at us like, 'Are you crazy?'" he says. "We said, 'What you talking about? This is nice.' Where I grew up, you'd see a lot of adverse conditions and most of the time when we were playing golf it was not 75, sunny with no wind. You have to realize that one of the ways I'm going to beat people is I'm going to out-compete people and I'm going to out-grit people."

Jack Nicklaus's standard rejoinder to hearing golfers rail about course set-up at the U.S. Open of, "One less guy I have to beat" certainly resonates with DiBitetto.

"I mean, if you're sitting out there and you're saying, 'Oh poor me, it's too windy, it's too cold, I can't feel my hands'—there's no chance of you being successful," he says.

Which is why on his office wall is the quote, "When it's too tough for them, it's just right for us."

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University of North Carolina Athletics

Players Mentioned

Ryan Burnett

Dougie Ergood

Ryan Gerard

Austin Hitt

Joshua Martin

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