North Carolina State University Athletics
PEELER: NCAA Champ Hill In No Rush
7/30/2009 12:00:00 AM | Men's Golf
Editor's note: This story was originally published in "The Wolfpacker" and is reprinted with persmission from Coman Publishing.
BY TIM PEELER
RALEIGH – Like when he is standing over a 10-foot putt, Matt Hill doesn’t want to rush things.
Sure, says the NC State sophomore golfer, he could give professional golf a try right now and maybe even succeed. After all, he just completed what might be remembered as the greatest season in the history of college golf, capping off his eight-win year by taking a two-stroke victory at the NCAA Championship and winning seven of the last eight tournaments in which he played.
The native of Bright’s Grove, Ontario, not only became just the second Canadian to win the NCAA title, he became the only other college golfer other than Tiger Woods to win his conference tournament, an NCAA Regional and the NCAA Championship in the same season.
So it’s no wonder that every professional agent and manufacturer’s representative at the Inverness Country Club in Toledo, Ohio, for the final college golf event of the year walked step-by-step with Hill on the final nine holes of the three-round tournament. They watched as he turned a two-stroke deficit into a two-shot win over the final nine hole, salivating at the prospect of finding golf’s next biggest thing.
Hill – surrounded by many family and friends who made the two-and-a-half hour drive from Sarnia to Toledo and NC State coaches Richard Sykes and Chip Watson – paid them no mind. Within 24 hours of becoming the first NC State golfer to win an NCAA individual title, he made it clear that he is not ready to join the likes of former Wolfpack golfers Tim Clark, Carl Pettersson and Marc Turnesa on the PGA Tour just year.
He plans to stay for his final two years of college competition and fulfill the promise he made to his parents to earn a college degree.
What, you thought that broad smile Sykes has been wearing since the NCAA Championship was just because Hill had some more hardware to add to his already filled trophy case?
Nope. It’s because he found a hidden gem of a player, watched him grow and can now revel in the fact that Hill is mature enough to know that even though he is the No. 2 player on the Royal and Ancient World Amateur Golf Rankings he is not yet ready, at the tender age of 20, to regularly compete against the world’s best professionals.
“I do feel like I have sailed along the last two years and gotten better,” Hill said, a day after winning the 114th college golf championship. “But I also feel like the next two years I can get even better and keep winning tournaments. I don’t quite feel like I am ready to be a pro right now. I like playing college golf and amateur golf will help me get that much better.
“I just want to keep getting better.”
Hill put his name alongside some of the best golfers in history by winning the NCAA title. Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Hale Irwin, North Carolina’s Harvie Ward and Wake Forest’s Curtis Strange and Jay Haas each won the same event during their college careers.
But, by returning, Hill could put himself into even more elite company. There have been only seven multiple winners of the college championship, which predates the NCAA and goes back to 1897.
Hill could possibly join Phil Mickelson of Arizona State or Ben Crenshaw of Texas as the only three-time winner of the NCAA Championship. Or he could join the other two-time winners: Dick Crawford of Houston, Dexter Cummings of Yale, George Dunlap of Princeton, Fred Lamprecht of Tulane and Scott Simpson of Southern California.
“Just to be associated with some of the people who have won it is a huge honor in itself,” Hill said.
Nicklaus, who honored Hill and three other college golfers on the final day of the Memorial Championship at his Muirfield Village Resort in Dublin, Ohio, suggested that Hill savor the college experience. That’s what golf’s most successful pre-Tiger player suggested to all the winners of the Nicklaus Awards, given to the top golfer in NCAA Division I, II and III and the NAIA.
And it’s not like Hill doesn’t have goals. He can repeat as an ACC or NCAA champion. Or perhaps pad ACC- and NCAA-record for wins in a season. (Woods is the only other college golfer to ever win eight times in a single season.) Maybe even break Mickelson’s unofficial NCAA record of 16 career victories. (Hill is already more than halfway there, thanks to his single win as a freshman and his eight wins as a sophomore.)
He could also become the first back-to-back winner since Mickelson won as a freshman and sophomore in 1989 and ’90.
At this point, the sky is the limit.
“I really have never seen any college golfer play the way he played at the end of the season,” said Sykes, who just completed his 39th season with the Wolfpack. “And I have been paying attention. He was just remarkable.”
Hill grew up in the tiny town of Bright’s Grove, Ontario, a suburb of Sarnia that is most famous in the world of athletics for being the hometown of Mike Weir, who became the first Canadian to ever win one of golf’s four majors when he won the 2003 Masters.
Weir was Hill’s hero growing up, and it was a thrill for the young player to meet Weir just before he enrolled at NC State. Weir invited several of Canada’s top male and female players to meet him in California in the summer of 2007 for a tour of the TaylorMade facility in Carlsbad, Calif., and a few rounds at the LaCosta Resort.
“It was pretty cool,” Hill said. “Just for him to take the time to do that for us was really special.”
Weir was impressed with the pre-champion Hill, recognizing the same qualities that Sykes noticed when the coach first saw Hill play.
“The thing that struck me about him right away was that he was just real motivated,” Weir said. “You could just tell. He was willing to work hard, to do what it takes.
“Plus, my friends who know him better say he’s a great kid, has a great attitude and his head’s in the right place.”
Hill and his older brother, Graham, developed their swings playing hockey, just like most kids in Canada. For more than a decade, they both played on traveling hockey teams. But the brothers also had a real passion for golf when the weather turned warm enough to go outside.
“As soon as I got into competition, I realized that golf was something I loved,” Hill said. “It made me want to get better and better and hopefully one day get on the professional golf tour.”
Graham Hill played collegiately at Eastern Michigan University and won the 2007 Mid-American Conference individual championship. Matt Hill always knew he wanted to follow in his brother’s footsteps, eventually choosing NC State over Oregon, Michigan State, Brigham Young and Kent State.
“I have always dreamed of playing college golf ever since I began playing competitively at the age of nine,” Matt Hill said. “My brother has always been my biggest competition growing up. We have always tried to beat each other’s brains out. Having that has made us both that much better at the game, competing. We have always competed against each other.
“He has been so supportive of me in everything I have done the last few years, and really inspired me to want to play college golf.”
Hill concedes his decision to come to Raleigh – the warmest town with an NHL franchise on his list of possible destinations – was boosted by the 2006 Stanley Cup Champion Carolina Hurricanes, if only for the opportunity to see his beloved Colorado Avalanche play once or twice a year.
Still, it took some convincing. Though Matt was a successful junior player, earning a spot on the Royal Canadian Golf Association Under-22 National Developmental Team, it took a recommendation from one of his junior rivals, Brad Revell, to get Sykes interested in recruiting Hill. Revel, one year older than Hill, is entering his senior season with the Wolfpack.
Hill refined his game under the tutelage of Ralph Bauer, one of Canada’s top instructors, and while competing for the Canadian team. But he gained his confidence by playing for the Wolfpack.
He garnered his first individual win at the Hootie @ Bull’s Bay Intercollegiate as a freshman, becoming the first NC State male golfer to win a spring event since 1996. But he won his second start of the fall as a sophomore, then caught fire in the spring.
“I didn’t really play my best golf at the Schenkel, but I still managed to win,” Hill said. “That showed me that I knew how to win and I knew how to play the golf course and not worry about how everyone else is doing.
“If you can do those things, and still win while not playing your best golf, it creates a lot of confidence.”
Because of his spring success, Hill has a busy schedule ahead of him for the summer. He won a U.S. Open local qualifier before the day after winning the NCAA Regional Championship, but did not advance through his sectional qualifier in Columbus, Ohio, where he competed against some of the top names on the PGA Tour.
He traveled with the Canadian team to Formby, England, for the British Amateur, but did not advance from stroke play to match play. He made the cut in his first PGA Tour event, after accepting an invitation to the AT&T Championship from the Tiger Woods Foundation. He followed in his brother's footsteps with a seven-stroke victory in the Ontario Amateur Championship in mid-July and then played in the Canadian Open, where he missed the cut.
This week, he is playing in the Buick Open, thanks to a sponsor's exemption, and will then play in both the Canadian Amateur and the U.S. Amateur before returning to Raleigh for the start of his junior year.
“I don’t have any other words to describe what this year has been like other than ‘unbelievable,’” Hill said. “I set some goals for this season – to be first-team All-America, to be the ACC player of the year – but I surpassed every expectation I had for what this season could be.”
And he’ll be back with the Wolfpack next year, with even higher expectations.
You may contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
