Princeton University Athletics
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Texas A&M, Baltusrol Set to Open Fall Season for Men's Golf
September 05, 2014 | Men's Golf
Heading to the same course where the Princeton men's golf team ended its spring season, the Tigers will open the 2014 fall campaign at Baltusrol Golf Club's Lower Course for a meeting with Texas A&M.
Sunday's 2 p.m. contest will be the first dual match for the Tigers in five years, since Princeton and Stanford opened the 2009 fall schedule at another veteran U.S. Open course, Shinnecock Hills on Long Island. Baltusrol, which has hosted the U.S. Open seven times, last in 1993, will host its second PGA Championship in 2016 and played host to the Ivy League Championship last spring.
Unlike that Stanford contest, which had a match-play format, Sunday's event will have a stroke-play format with the best four scores counting from each team's set of five players.
While the match will be Princeton's first day of practice, it'll come against a program that took home the NCAA team title in 2009 and has posted two more top-10 finishes since, most recently tying for sixth place in 2013 before finishing 29th at the NCAA finals last year.
Princeton, which will be without its incoming freshman class due to the university's opening exercises, will send the starting five of sophomores Alex Dombrowski and Jason Chen, junior Matt Gerber and seniors Joseph D'Amato and Jason Zhou. At last year's Ivy meet on the same course, Dombrowski, Gerber and Chen competed for Princeton alongside the now-graduated Greg Jarmas '14 and Nick Ricci '14.
Dombrowski provided one of the program's highlights of the summer, reaching the match play portion of the U.S. Amateur Public Links Championship in Kansas in July.
Texas A&M will travel six players, including juniors Ben Crancer, Andrew Lister and Adria Arnaus, and freshmen Connor Black, Cameron Champ and Andrew Paysse. All three of the juniors were part of the Aggies' NCAA finals lineup last year. It will be the first meeting between Princeton and Texas A&M in dual-match play.
Following the dual match, the fall schedule will continue with three fall tournaments, including the Dartmouth-hosted New England Invitational on the last weekend of September, the Yale-hosted MacDonald Cup on the first weekend of October, and the California-hosted Alister MacKenzie Invitational Oct. 13-14. Only the MacDonald Cup has appeared on Princeton's schedule before, with the Tigers having competed in that tournament in the 2011 fall season.