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On Wednesday, the NCAA announced the fields for the regional rounds of the 2021 men’s golf championship. As somewhat expected, Marquette did not earn a team at-large bid to the national championship. However, 2021 Big East co-medalist Hunter Eichhorn will be representing the Golden Eagles in the Kingston Springs regional as an individual!
Eichhorn ended up in a tie with Butler’s Michael Cascino at -7 for the individual title at the Big East championship. Since Connecticut won the team title, that meant that Eichhorn and Cascino had to have a playoff to see who would get the league’s automatic individual bid to the NCAA championship. It went three holes before Cascino finally beat out Eichhorn, thus paving the way for the Marquette redshirt junior to earn an at-large bid on Wednesday.
This is the fourth time in program history that a Marquette player has earned an at-large bid to play in the NCAA regionals. Mike Van Sickle did it twice in 2007 and 2009, and Matt Murlick earned his way into the field in 2018.
2021 will be the third straight NCAA championship appearance for Eichhorn. He won the individual title at the Big East championship in 2018 and then made his way to regionals in 2019 as Marquette won the Big East’s automatic berth as a team. There was, of course, no NCAA tournament in 2020 due to the pandemic.
Eichhorn will play his three rounds of regional golf at The Golf Club of Tennessee on May 17-19. He is seeded sixth amongst the 10 individual players who were assigned to the Kingston Springs regional. Eichhorn isn’t just competing with those nine other gentlemen, though. The top five teams out of the 13 playing in the Nashville area will advance to the NCAA Finals at Grayhawk Golf Club in Arizona, as will the top individual not on those top five teams. That’s 40 other men on the eight teams that won’t advance that would be eligible for that lone individual spot, so Eichhorn has his work cut out for him.