"IF YOU LIKE GOLF"
online golf column
by
Chris Dortch

May 16, 2008

Adam Mitchell can recall the exact moment his career as a college golfer rose to a higher plane.

It was the fall of 2006, Mitchell’s sophomore season at the University of Georgia. With the Bulldogs poised to win the Schenkel Invitational, Mitchell, the former Chattanooga McCallie star, stood in the fairway on the final hole of the tournament and faced a decision.

“It was a par-five,” said Mitchell, who’s making a triumphant return to Chattanooga this week in the NCAA East Regional at Council Fire. “If you hit two pretty good shots, you had a chance to get on the green. I remember I laced a 3-wood right at the flag. It ended up about 10 feet from the hole.”

Mitchell drained the putt for eagle, Georgia won the team championship, and Mitchell finished fourth individually. There’s been little stopping him since. In his next 13 tournaments, including eight in this, his junior year, Mitchell has finished ninth or better eight times, including ninth at last year’s NCAA Championships and seventh in the recent SEC Tournament, a showing that solidified his first-team All-SEC status.

Mitchell’s remarkable consistency earned him one of college golf’s highest honors recently when he was chosen to represent the United States in the Palmer Cup, which pits American collegians against their counterparts from Europe. Mitchell will travel to Scotland for that Ryder Cup-style match in late June and also play in the British Amateur the week before, kicking off a summer of golf he hopes will help him notch another career goal, playing for the U.S. Walker Cup team.

“That would be a great honor,” Mitchell said. “But obviously there’s a lot of golf to be played before I can achieve something like that. Right now, I just want to play one tournament at a time, one shot at a time, and just keep on doing what I’ve been doing.”

Mitchell has made it a habit of broadcasting the elevation of his game in dramatic fashion. That eagle at the 2006 Schenkel tournament was a huge boost to his confidence and clearly demonstrated to him and everyone else he could pull off difficult shots in pressure-packed situations. As a junior player, he opened the floodgates to his college recruitment with a record 12-under-par 60 in winning the 2004 Bubba Conlee Tournament. If upper-major college coaches had questions about whether Mitchell was capable of going deep, that little 60 answered them in a hurry.

In ’04, Mitchell credited his work with a sports psychologist for his improvement. Since he’s been at Georgia, the short game has been the key to his impressive rise.

“I’ve been working hard on my chipping and putting,” Mitchell said. “It gives you a lot of confidence to fire at flags when you aren’t worried about being able to get up and down if you miss a green.”

Another more dramatic event has also, in its own way, helped Mitchell’s game. A cousin, with whom Mitchell was very close, recently passed away at age 25. That jolted him to his core.

“That kind of put golf into perspective,” Mitchell said. “Golf is just a game. If you hit a bad shot, if you make a bogey, it’s not the end of the world. You’ve still got plenty of holes to make up for it.”

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The careers of Mitchell and his Georgia teammate, freshman Harris English, have mirrored one another. Like Mitchell, English forged his reputation at a Chattanooga prep school (Baylor). And like Mitchell, who nearly won the 2006 Tennessee State Open as an 18-year-old Georgia freshman, English signaled his game was ready for the highest levels of amateur golf with his play in a major state event.

When English won the Georgia Amateur last July at age 17, he became the youngest player to do so since a 14-year-old Bobby Jones in 1916. A month after that English was in Athens, trying to make the Bulldogs’ five-man traveling team.

English did that and much, much more. He won his second tournament ever, the Brickyard Championship, with scores of 65-71-68. To prove that wasn’t a fluke, he won his next tournament, the Isleworth Invitational, with closing rounds of 67-66.

Just like Mitchell, English quickly showed he wasn’t afraid to go low.

“Winning the Georgia Amateur gave me a lot of confidence,” English said. “But I knew I had to step up my game. There are so many great players at Georgia. If I wanted to get into the top five, I had to play well.”

English has played better than anyone could have hoped and has added to his trophy room collection. English was voted the SEC’s Freshman of the Year, made the league’s All-Freshman team and was also second-team All-SEC.

“Harris has been awesome,” Mitchell said. “He’s come in here as a freshman and really played well. But you knew he could compete. He’s just proven what we all knew.”

Like Mitchell, Harris says short-game work has been a huge key to his development. He credits a little game the Bulldogs call “Gauntlet,” with making short-game practice fun and challenging.

“It’s a little nine-hole game,” English says. “We spray paint spots on the course where you have to get it up and down from. Par is two. If you shoot 3 over or less for nine holes, you get to stop. If you go over that, you keep going. I can remember one day I stayed out there all afternoon. But my short game has gotten a lot better.”

English proved that at Council Fire in the NCAA East Regional’s second round on Friday. English started on the back nine and turned at 1-under. He then reeled off five back nine birdies, including four straight from No. 4 through No. 7 to shoot a 6-under-65.

By his own admission, putting problems this spring have kept English from being as dominant as he was in the fall, but those might have gone by the wayside on Friday. In that birdie streak, he made a 10-footer at No. 4, a 30-footer at No. 5, an eight-footer at No. 6 and a 20-footer at No. 7.

“I stopped worrying about whether it was going to go in,” English said. “I just wanted to roll it toward the hole, and trust my line.

“That worked pretty well.”

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