The Kent State men’s golf team went into the Boilermaker Invitational in West Lafayette, Indiana looking for momentum.

Instead, the Flashes were dead last at the end of round one.

In the end, the Flashes limped out of Indiana, finishing 12th out of 15 teams.

Coach Herb Page didn’t hold back his disappointment on the performance.

“We just played bad,” Page said. “We played really poorly. We had some bad swings and could never really recover from that.”

Page said you can’t expect to play good shooting double and triple bogeys.

“If you look at our scores, with double and triple bogeys, you can’t expect the scores to reflect well,” Page said. “I think we had like two double bogeys and three triple bogeys and you do that. Going from under par to over par in a 20-minute span is…we were awful. It was embarrassing.”

Since weather canceled round three, Page said it wouldn’t have made a difference if the third round went ahead.

“Damage was done,” Page said. “We just stink right now. We stunk. It was absolute poor play by Kent State golf.”

The poor play was only furthered when Page said they have had past success in West Lafayette.

“We’ve had great history here,” Page said. “We won here before and almost won the national championship in 2012.”

Page took the blame for the bad showing and said they have to get back to work before the postseason.

“I blame myself as a coach,” Page said. “I’m responsible, but we don’t blame anyone individually. We win and lose as a team. I’m part of that team. We have to get our resilience back and get back to work. We need to identify what went wrong and get better. It’s up to me to get them back at it. We have talent but it means nothing, and we have to recover.

“We’ve been underachieving. We need to start overachieving.”

The Flashes have one more tournament, the Kepler Intercollegiate in Columbus, Ohio next weekend, before the MAC Championships in Aurora. The Championships start on April 26.

Zachary McKnight is a sports reporter. Contact him at [email protected].