Bentley Receives 9th Straight Bid to NCAA East/Atlantic Golf Regional
WALTHAM, Mass. – The field for the 2019 NCAA Division II regional golf tournaments was announced late Friday afternoon with Bentley University included for the ninth consecutive year and the 14th time in the last 18 years. The Falcons received the Northeast-10 Conference's automatic berth by virtue of winning the conference championship back in October.
The East and Atlantic regional tournaments will be held jointly at the Totteridge Golf Club in Greensburg, Pa. May 9-11. The top three teams (regardless of region) and the top two student-athletes not with a qualifying team will advance to the finals, which will be held May 20-24 at The Resort at Glad Springs in Daniels, W.V.
Bentley was one of eight at-large selections and was seeded third out of the East, behind Franklin Pierce University and Southern New Hampshire University.
The automatic qualifiers in the East Region were Southern New Hampshire, as the Northeast-10 Conference champion, and Dominican College (N.Y.) from the Central Atlantic Athletic Conference.
The other at-large selections from the East were Franklin Pierce, St. Thomas Aquinas College, Assumption College, Post University, Roberts Wesleyan University, Concordia College (N.Y.) and Wilmington University (Delaware).
Four of the ten teams are from the Northeast-10, four are from the CACC and both St. Thomas Aquinas and Roberts Wesleyan are from the East Coast Conference.
The ten teams out of the Atlantic Region include automatic qualifiers Charleston (Mountain West Conference), West Chester University (Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference) and Virginia Union University (Central Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.
Bentley, which has secured an NCAA bid in each of coach Mickey Herron's nine years at the helm, is playing its best golf of the season after winning both the Newport Classic and the California University Crofton Invitational in its last two tournaments. Among the teams the Falcons defeated in the Crofton were five that earned NCAA bids, including Indiana University (Pa.), the number two team in the Atlantic.
Three of Bentley's top five players this season also represented Bentley in the NCAA regional in 2018. That list includes senior Chris Simione (Cheshire, Conn./Cheshire HS) and sophomore Tommy Ethier (Nashua. N.H./Bishop Guertin HS), who are 1-2 on the team in stroke average at 75.3 and 75.5, respectively.
The rest of Coach Herron's lineup is expected to include senior Doug Kulikowski (Pittsford, N.Y./ Pittsford Sutherland HS), junior Robert Falconer (Mechanicsburg, Pa./Cumberland Valley HS) and sophomore Ellis Yoder (Fort Wayne, Ind./Homestead HS). Kulikowski, the reigning Northeast-10 Player of the Week, is one over during his past four rounds.
Bentley has experience on the Totteridge Course, having played in a tournament there back in October.
Last year, Bentley finished tenth in the regional with a 304-299-297-900.