Southern Illinoise University Athletics
Justin Fetcho press conference transcript
02/12/2020 | 11:00:00 | Men's Golf
CARBONDALE, Ill. — Southern Illinois men's golf head coach Justin Fetcho met with the media Tuesday afternoon to preview the 2020 spring season. Below is a partial transcript. Click here to watch the entire press conference.
Opening Statement
We leave a week from tomorrow to open up the season at Florida State. I'm looking forward to getting off to a strong start down there. It's going to be a great field, where six teams are ranked top-50 nationally. We are going to battle against some really good competition. I think that goes along with what we were doing in the fall. We played about seven of the top-25 teams in the country, including the No. 1 team. Our spring schedule continues with where we left off in the fall. We have seen some really good improvements from the end of the fall season to now. I am excited with what I've seen with a lot of our players. We just came off our best practice of the year yesterday. We were able to get out and produce some good qualifying scores. It's been a tight battle to try and find who's going to make it to the first event. But it's been fun to get back and compete. As much as qualifying is an important process, I think the guys are just looking forward to competing against other teams and getting to travel. Once next week hits, the season will be in full force. We go out to Florida State, Michigan's event in Arizona, Louisiana for spring break and Gulf Shores later in March. Then we hit two more with Purdue and Iowa before our conference championship hosted by Loyola in Flossmoor, Illinois. We're looking forward to getting the spring off to a good start. The guys have been working hard and I've seen tremendous amount of improvement. Since I've been here, we've always improved in the spring. I'm looking forward to seeing that happen again.
On recruiting international golfers...
I've been fortunate to coach at Illinois, Oregon and South Florida prior to SIU. I've been able to make a lot of connections throughout the world. I talk to people I trust not just about American players, but international players as well. When I was at Illinois, we had a pretty good connection to Belgium, where a couple of our best players came from. They are playing on the European Tour right now and have played at the Masters. We have a player from Belgium that fell on that pipeline for us here. The connections through my time coaching has helped us recruit the type of player we are looking for here.
On this season's challenging tournament schedule…
We're able to get strong student-athletes to come here through our tournament schedule. We try to not back down for any team. We want to go to the places where the best teams are. We have been fortunate to go to Hawaii, Florida and California. But it wouldn't be as fun to go to those places as a group if we didn't get to compete at the highest level. That's part of it. It's exciting when you get to go to Hawaii and face several top-25 teams and the No. 1 team in the country. I don't know if Gonzaga is the No. 1 team in the country right now in basketball, but if they were in the Banterra Center, this place would be rocking. That's the same feeling we get when we get to play against high-level competition.
On the development of sophomore golfer Matthis Besard…
He was tremendous for us as a freshman and was the conference newcomer of the year. He's continued to mature and would probably tell you that he wanted to perform at a higher level in the fall. That piece right there motivated him to come back and know that he still has areas in his game to improve. He's looking forward to having a much better spring and continuing to try and do things he was able to do for us last year. He hasn't regressed in any matter, but his expectations went up. He didn't quite perform to that in the fall. A big piece of that was his mental approach. He worked a lot on his mental approach over the break and into the spring. He's making strides in that everyday, just like our others players.
On freshman golfer Riley Klingelberg's fall performance…
Any time you are coming in as a freshman, there are going to be highs and lows. He came from California to a new environment and new place. Riley has tremendous upside and is a very good golfer. Just like a lot of things I talked about with Matthis, those are also things we need to continue to work on with Riley. Some things we've worked on is his mental approach, maturity and how to think along the golf course. But he had some great moments in the fall. He won conference golfer of the week at NC State's event. He played four or five of the six events in the fall, so he was still a key part of what he had. If he can continue to improve and develop, he will be a key player for us down the line.
On characteristics he sees in this year's squad compared to his previous championship-winning teams…
This group relates a lot closer to the first year we won in 2016. We had a group that was a lot more inexperienced. In 2016, four out of the five guys were newcomers. We just worked and rallied around each other. We worked extremely hard throughout the year and hit highs and lows. However, we kept believing and improving throughout the year. We put ourselves in tough competition and right before our conference tournament, we played at Ohio State and Purdue on two difficult golf courses. We knew we were going on a difficult golf course for our conference championship. It gave us more confidence, knowing that we had already been doing it. I don't think anyone else in our conference had. It gave us that spark that we needed, which is along the lines of this year. When we won last year, our lineup was primarily upperclassmen. Three of the five guys were seniors with a lot of experience and two of them were apart of the conference championship in 2016. We have three new guys this year, but those who returned are still inexperienced in the lineup. It's hard to teach experience, so for them to get in the lineup in the fall to learn and be able to go in the spring better than before is what I envision. That team in 2016 progressed and kept working as inexperienced golfers, but gained experience throughout the year. We were able to find success towards the end of the season due to it.
On conference competition...
Our sport is unique in that we can schedule however we want. We may not see a Valley team until the conference championship, but it's not really us versus them or how they attack certain things compared to us. It's really just about how we're going to get ready for the golf course. We try to have the best game plan we possibly can. We try and just focus on ourselves and things we can control. We can't play defense against any of the other schools. If they're playing well, there is nothing we can do about it. Illinois State is currently on top in the rankings right now. I don't know if it's a good omen for us or not, but they have been on top after the fall the last three or four years. Luckily for us, we have been able to make some strides and move up during the spring. There is a lot to take away from past experiences that we can only gain from.
