What happened<\/p>\n
A course record for Jackson Buchanan at 8-under 63 did the heavy lifting for Illinois in the first round of the NCAA Urbana Regional on Monday at Atkins Golf Club. The Illini finished the opening round at 7-under and atop the team leaderboard with Ryan Voois (1-under 70) and Max Herendeen (even-par 71) joining Buchanan (the individual leader) in the top 20. Texas Tech was second after one round, with all five of its golfers among the top 20.<\/p>\n
What it means<\/p>\n
Home course advantage is just as strong as home court or home field it seems. It wasn’t a flawless day for Illinois, but the familiarity with the ins and outs of Atkins Golf Club didn’t hurt in vaulting the Illini to the top of the regional leaderboard after one round. A visibly (and vocally) confident Buchanan leading the way was a difference maker in the first round and could be a driving force for Illinois to a second straight regional title.<\/p>\n
What’s next<\/p>\n
A two-stroke lead on Texas Tech isn’t all that wide of a margin for Illinois heading into Tuesday’s second round at Atkins Golf Club. Five other teams are within 10 strokes, which can be made up in a hurry with four golfers’ scores counting each day. The presumably stiffest challengers, though, all have work to do. Top-seeded Oklahoma State shot 2-over Monday to sit in seventh, while North Carolina (another top 10 team) was 8-over in 11th place.<\/p>\n
What was said<\/p>\n
“These other teams are good teams. They’re going to figure this golf course out. When we go to places, we always say by the second day or third day you should be getting a better feel for it. That’s what these other teams are going to do. Would I have loved to shot 20-under (Monday)and just ran this thing away? Yeah, but that doesn’t happen. (Tuesday) is 0-0 in our mind.” \u2014 Illinois coach Mike Small after the first round<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What happened A course record for Jackson Buchanan at 8-under 63 did the heavy lifting for Illinois in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28293,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3723],"tags":[7,217,3706,231,772,1544],"class_list":{"0":"post-28292","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-college-basketball","10":"tag-illini-sports","11":"tag-ncaa","12":"tag-ncaa-basketball","13":"tag-ncaab"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/114497236792023986","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}