The Fordham golf team finished the fall season on a high note, tying for second place out of the 10 teams at the Metropolitan Intercollegiate Championship in November. They will get the spring season started next week at the Columbia Spring Invitational looking to capitalize on a short spring schedule before the Atlantic 10 Championship in late April. 

Jersey-born junior P.J. O’Rourke leads the Rams. O’Rourke posted a scoring average of 74.5 in the five events of the fall schedule and held the lowest round on the team last semester, a second-round 68 at the Hartford Invite. He was certainly disappointed to not get another look at Hartford this spring after Monday’s event was canceled in Connecticut’s capital. 

Looking to make a bounce back this fall is junior John Kryscio, who was a stalwart on the 2020-21 team, but struggled in the first half of this season. His scoring average went up by almost a full stroke between last spring and this fall . Despite being only a junior, he is being counted on to lead a young team to another chance at the A-10 Championship.

This spring will be played under the same sad overtone as the fall season was under interim head coach Dan O’Connor. The Rams responded well to O’Connor’s first half-season at the helm after legendary coach Paul Dillon’s passing last summer. All but two freshmen, Garrett Brown and Jake Mrva, played under Dillon for at least one season, and they will continue to play for their former coach. O’Connor was Dillon’s main assistant for multiple seasons and has brought continuity to the team that has made the otherwise difficult transition easier. 

After the season opener against Columbia, the Rams will head to the Steel Club in Hellertown, Pennsylvania, to participate in the Abarta Coca-Cola Collegiate Invitational, hosted by Lafayette College. They placed seventh out of 13 teams last season and 14th out of 20 teams in 2019. They will look to have a better performance there, as it is traditionally an event where they play against A-10 opponents La Salle University, St. Joseph’s University and St. Bonaventure University. Last year, Fordham beat the La Salle Explorers and the St. Joe’s Hawks at Lafayette and were better than both of those teams by season’s end in Florida. 

The third and final event of the spring schedule is a return to the course at the Yale Spring Invitational. In the fall, Fordham placed 13th out of 14 squads at Connecticut’s top course for a disappointing finish. They will head back to New Haven Easter weekend for a one-day event on Saturday to try and better that second-to-last finish. O’Rourke will look to continue his performance from the fall’s MacDonald Cup, as he placed T-11 and started the event with a career low round of 70. 

The goal for this year is simple: to place higher than ninth at the A-10 Championship with this young squad. They will only be losing Ryan Davis off the team to graduation and will return their lowest scorers in O’Rourke and Kryscio as well as important leaders in Nicholas Manning and Andreas Aivazoglou. As the weather warms up, look for Fordham golf to shine this spring in their three events before the A-10 Championship this April.