Sept. 8, 2005
When Mark Leroux was hired last June as the sixth head men's golf coach in University of Missouri history, he sought to do what he had done at his previous job at Austin Peay: Take a program near the basement of the conference in terms of budget and results, and bring them up to the conference elite.
Leroux and his squad did just that in his first year, breaking every record on the school charts and leading the Tigers to their first NCAA National Championships appearance in 19 years.
What's even more remarkable about the turnaround is that it didn't occur in a season - it happened in the span of just a couple of months.
The season started out slowly in the fall, as the Tigers finished third-to-last in each of their first three tournaments. As much as they struggled, though, it would be the last time MU would not finish in the top 10 of a tournament until the final weekend of the season.
At the Mizzou-hosted Missouri Bluffs Intercollegiate in St. Charles, junior Ben Scott posted his first of eight top-10 finishes on the year with a third-place showing. That matched MU's third-place performance, the first of seven top-four finishes the Tigers would earn over the course of the season.
At MU's final tournament of the fall season, the Tigers finished fourth at Stanford with the third-best tournament score in school history.
Scott started off the spring season in fine fashion at the Matlock Invitational in Lakeland, Fla., sharing medalist honors for his first career tournament title and the first by a Tiger since Mark McBride in 2001.
Fellow junior Chris Mabry started to pick up the slack the next several weeks, as he was the Tigers' top finisher in each of the next four tournaments.
Scott joined Mabry in a tie for eighth place at the Stevinson Ranch Invitational in California late in March, and the team's fourth-place finish seemed to be the starting point for a stretch run that had the Tigers poised for a surprise berth to the NCAA Regional Championships, which would be just the program's seventh in the 17 years of the current qualification format.
The month of April then saw perhaps the best month of golf by a Mizzou quintet in the program's 79-year history. It started with a dominating wire-to-wire victory at the Belmont Invitational. Mabry and sophomore Shawn Jasper each scorched the Vanderbilt Legends Club for school-record rounds of eight-under-par 63 to begin the tournament. Mabry went on to break the school 54-hole record, set by All-American Stan Utley in 1983, by five strokes. [Jasper also bettered Utley's record.]
Mizzou's 35-stroke victory was the first since 2003, and the first spring-season title since 1995. It also propelled the Tigers to a win two weeks later at Purdue, marking the first time in 10 years that Mizzou won two tournaments in the same semester.
Leroux's charges rolled into the Big 12 Championships with a head full of steam, but were riding against history: Missouri had only once in the previous eight years finished finished higher than eighth, and that was a fifth-place showing. The pre-tournament seeding agreed, as MU was slotted ninth. The Tigers were undaunted, though, going wire-to-wire in third place for the school's best-ever Big 12 finish, and MU's best overal placing in a conference tournament since 1988. Scott (fifth) and Jasper (seventh) led the Tiger charge individually.
What seemed in doubt less than two months earlier - not to mention back in June - turned into a mere formality in early May, as the Tigers were selected to compete in the NCAA Central Regional. With a No. 21 seed and low expectations, the Tigers continued to persevere, placing third after each of the first two rounds and tying for sixth after the final loop of the Warren Course at Notre Dame. That propelled the Tigers to their first NCAA National Championships appearance since 1986.
In Baltimore, Md., Mizzou finished 20th as a team - the best finish since the Utley-led 1984 squad placed 14th - and Jasper was the first Missouri golfer to make the final-round cut. His tie for 16th place earned him All-America Honorable Mention accolades.
The team's strong play continued into the summer: John Kelly was the runner-up at the Missouri State Amateur, and Mabry and Jasper qualified for the 105th U.S. Amateur at Merion GC.