Men's Golf Breaks Out Revamped Roster In Opener At Sahalee

Saturday, September 7

Sammamish, Wash. (Sahalee Golf Club)

All Day

North Carolina

Sahalee Players Championship Day One

2024-2025 team
University of North Carolina Men's Golf
Chapman Center
Chapel Hill, NC
Thursday, August 29, 2024

Photo by: Jeffrey A. Camarati

September 6, 2024 | Men's Golf

By: Steve Kirschner

Carolina begins the 2024-25 season this weekend in Sammamish, Wash., in the Sahalee Players Championship hosted by the University of Washington at Sahalee Golf Club.
The Tar Heels will tee off with a lineup that returns only two starters from a season ago, when UNC won seven times and finished in the top five in the NCAA Championship for the fourth year in a row.

Senior All-Americas David Ford and Maxwell Ford (Peachtree Corners, Ga.) are back and are joined in the lineup by Keaton Vo, a junior from Austin, Texas, freshman Ethan Paschal (Fayetteville, N.C.) and sophomore Hampton Roberts (Cary, N.C.).

Vo, Roberts and Paschal step in for Austin Greaser, Peter Fountain and Dylan Menante, who each earned All-America honors at some point in their careers and were among the five Tar Heel starters who made the 2024 All-ACC team.

Greaser, Fountain and Menante combined to play in 12 NCAA Championships, advancing to match play in each of the last four seasons. They played a combined 458 rounds of stroke play and were a net 41 under par. Greaser won two NCAA regionals, Menante started at Pepperdine when the Waves won the 2021 NCAA title and Fountain was a first-team All-America and ACC champion in 2021.

Vo played the last two seasons for the Texas Longhorns, competing in the 2023 and 2024 Big 12 Championships, NCAA regionals and NCAA Championships. He led the Longhorns with an eighth-place finish in last season's Big 12 Tournament and was runner-up as a freshman in the Southwestern Invitational.

Roberts played in five tournaments last season, shooting a 67 and 68 en route to 7-under 209 in the Amer Ari Invitational and posted 70-71 at the Jubilee Course in St. Andrews.

Paschal is one of four freshmen on the nine-man roster. He was the medalist in the North Carolina high school state championship as a junior and runner-up as a senior in leading Terry Sanford High School to back-to-back team titles.

Another freshman, Grant Roscich from Glen Ellyn, Ill., is competing at Sahalee as an individual entry.

David Ford is a preseason first-team All-America and on the Haskins Award Watch List. He's Carolina's all-time leader in scoring average (70.58) and is 73 strokes below par over 108 rounds as a Tar Heel.

Maxwell Ford won the clinching point in UNC's 3-2 win over Wake Forest in the 2024 ACC Championship semifinals and was leading his match against Florida State in the NCAA quarterfinals when the Seminoles clinched the team point.

Both Fords were members of the 2024 United States team that went to Ireland in July and won the Palmer Cup.

Despite the revamped roster, the Tar Heels enter the season No. 5 in the Golf Coaches poll.

The Sahalee Players Championship field also includes No. 2 Arizona State, No. 10 Florida, No. 14 Arizona, No. 18 Washington, No. 19 Texas A&M, No. 20 Oklahoma State, No. 24 Duke, Northwestern, UNLV, Oregon, Pepperdine and TCU.